Samson Young
Pavilion
New Taipei City Art Museum

Samson Young’s Pavilion (2025) jolted the gaze upward, to confront uncharted depths. A massive, multiscreen contraption loomed high in the pitch-black ether of the New Taipei City Art Museum’s cavernous main hall, raining torrential images from the information heavens: stuttering footage of athletics meets (odes to human aspiration and bodily perfectibility); glitching, overexposed spacecraft interiors (visions of technological mastery and progress); and blinking, diagrammatic abstractions that cascade without end, never coalescing into narrative. What cohered was less iconographic program than kinetic regime: things warped, accelerated, spasmed, and spluttered toward an indeterminate elsewhere, while sonorous harmonies of a male choir, echoing the György Ligeti textures Stanley Kubrick deployed in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), flooded the vast darkness. The effect was paradoxically soothing and deeply foreboding—an aural gravity that coursed through the body with magnetic, trance-inducing intensity.