For Whom the Bell Tolls

Journeys and encounters with other countries and people play a decisive role in the creative process of many artists. Last year we published The Sense of Movement: When Artists Travel, the first volume commemorating the BMW Art Journey—a joint initiative by BMW and Art Basel that supports artists with travel grants. That inaugural compendium featured iconic artists’ journeys through art history. The second volume in the series memorializes the first journey undertaken by a recipient of this unique award. Hong Kong-based artist and composer Samson Young traced the sounds and the complex histories of bells in a two-months-long journey that took him to eleven countries on five continents. The artist’s compositions, images, and texts give expression to the relationships of tensions between war and peace, solidarity and strife, and of the political dimension of sound.