Multidisciplinary artist Samson Young works in sound, performance, video and installation, and in 2017 he represented Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale with a solo project entitled ‘Songs for Disaster Relief’. He has received the BMW Art Journey Award, the Prix Ars Electronica Award for Excellence in Sound Art and Digital Music, and the inaugural Uli Sigg Award in 2020.

I watched Samson’s Nocturne, a piece he did using live foley and with a connection to the military aspect. In the live Foley he used drums, sand and electric razors to accurately simulate the sounds of explosions, gunshots and debris. What shocked me even more was Samson’s research into examples of artists participating in warfare, and his discovery of the 23rd Headquarters Special Forces, an American tactical unit from World War II, popularly known as the ‘Ghost Unit’. It was a unit of artists – sound technicians, architects, musicians, actors, painters and set designers – whose main task was to conceive and execute deception. They used fake radio transmissions, recorded battle sounds and inflatable tanks in order to create the illusion of an active battlefield and mislead enemy forces.