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James Taylor-Foster, a 32-year-old British-Swedish curator, wants you to fall asleep at their exhibition. Taylor-Foster, who uses he/they pronouns, said that would be the ultimate compliment for “WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD: The World of ASMR.”
“It’s a weird space of public intimacy that requires a certain degree of vulnerability,” said Taylor-Foster, who curated the show, which explores what was once a little corner of the internet that’s now become a global phenomenon.
A.S.M.R., or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a vaguely scientific-sounding term coined by a medical forum user in 2010 to describe a tingling feeling that spreads through a person’s scalp; a warm, effervescent wave that can also make its way down a person’s spine and could be produced by a variety of stimuli such as whispers, caresses, and looking at people playing with things like kinetic sand.
A.S.M.R. soon took on its own life, and became an entire genre of videos on the internet that now number in the millions.
The exhibition, which unfolds in five sections, opened last week and will run through July 13 at Gate33 Gallery in Hong Kong’s Airside mall. With a focus on the auditory, visual and tactile, the exhibit brings the online world of gentle tapping, whispers and caresses into the real world.
Over 40 pieces in various media will be on display, including a mechanical tongue dripping with saliva created by the Swedish artist Tobias Bradford; a motion graphic of synthetic vegetables made by the Copenhagen-based art duo Wang & Soderstrom; and what’s thought to be the first A.S.M.R. video, a whispering video uploaded to YouTube 15 years ago.
There will also be a room dedicated to the American painter Bob Ross, known for his dulcet tones, gentle affirmations and careful paintbrush scratches; and the coup de grâce: a giant chill-out area, made of a kilometer-long soft plush sausage pillow, sculpted to mimic the folds of the brain, where people are encouraged to watch videos and fall asleep.
“We do live in an incredibly noisy world, an incredibly loud and noisy world that is increasingly complex,” Taylor-Foster said. “And I think ultimately, A.S.M.R. is guiding us to have, even if briefly, that little kind of moment of focus, of sensorial focus.”
“It helps some people’s anxiety or insomnia, whatever, for a reason, because it is deeply important to what it means to be human,” they added.
In putting the show together, Taylor-Foster spent a lot of time thinking about what attracts us to A.S.M.R. in this day and age, and how the phenomenon fits into our values as a society.
“It’s completely subversive,” the curator noted. “You know, it, like literally takes the ever-increasing speed of the internet or the processes in our smartphones. It takes that almost impossible accumulation of speed and proficiency, and it says, ‘Wait, no, I’m going to use all this and I’m going to make something that is soft, slow, particularly antithetical to the world in which we live in.’
“And that is a form of radicalism. I do think that at its core, A.S.M.R. is a kind of radical response to something that we all know deep down inside is probably not good for us long term.”
Taylor-Foster has seen the public perception of A.S.M.R. change over the years.
“When I would talk about A.S.M.R. in 2019, 2020, people would laugh,” Taylor-Foster said. “Like they would laugh either because they thought it was stupid and irrelevant, or they would laugh because maybe they watched it every day, but they didn’t want to tell anybody.”
The early days of the pandemic, the curator said, changed all that as people looked for forms of self-medication against insomnia, anxiety and isolation they felt as countries across the world entered lockdowns.
The first iteration of the show opened at Taylor-Foster’s home institution, the ArkDes museum in Stockholm, in 2020 — first online, at the height of the period when people were coming to terms with social distancing, and later in person. The second edition of the show opened at the Design Museum in London in 2022, as people grappled with being back in the crowds. Taylor-Foster noted that the London iteration of the show saw some 97,000 people attend over several months.
New to the Hong Kong show is an installation from two local sound artists, Kin Lam, 32, and AK Kan, 30, that recreates the soporific feeling of being on Hong Kong public transportation.
“Hong Kong people, we sleep in buses and the MTR and the minibus,” Kan, a sound engineer, whose Cantonese name is Kan Hei-chun, said on a recent video call, using the shorthand term for the Hong Kong subway. “I used to sleep every time when I go to school and I just lay on the window, like that,” he said, making a leaning motion, “and just sleep like that. And I was thinking, ‘Why?’”
He couldn’t grasp why he could sleep in such an uncomfortable position, and wondered why people tend to sleep so much while riding public transportation.
Lam, his collaborator — a percussionist and electronic sound artist who teaches at the Hong Kong Baptist University, where I also teach — agreed.
Lam said, “I would think all the white noise, all the people talking in the busy transportation, this is not going to be good for A.S.M.R. But then when I start doing the recording, it’s like, actually, it’s quite nice, because of all the low frequencies and all the hum.”
“And also, you are in a moving vehicle, there’s also, like, some vibration and that actually makes you feel quite nice,” he added.
It’s something a local travel agency also noticed at the height of the pandemic. The company sold tickets for a 5-hour bus tour designed to allow people to take a snooze (ear plugs and sleep masks included in the price of the ticket). Tickets were snapped up in three days, with people paying between HK$99 (US$12.70) and HK$399 for a seat.
Lam and Kan — along with Daisy Chu, the curator with the property developer Nan Fung Group, that owns Airside, who brought “WEIRD SENSATION” to Hong Kong — have also created a do-it-yourself A.S.M.R. station at the exhibition. In it, people can use locally sourced objects like a bamboo dim-sum steamer, calligraphy brushes, jade massage balls and “villain-hitting” slippers to explore what sounds give them the tingles, and record it.
“A.S.M.R. is usually, to me, quite gimmicky,” Lam said. “But the more I do research, and the more I think about it, it’s actually something really close to sound art.”
“Sound art, it’s how you listen, how you change the way you listen,” he added.
He holds up the bamboo steamer as an example of an ordinary object that can take on an auditory life of its own. There’s a gentle rustling as he runs his fingers across the side, a crunchy rhythm as he taps the lid.
“When you have contact with this object, it responds to you,” Lam said. “We always look for something interesting, or for something new constantly, but actually, you need to sit with one sound for a long time. “It tells you ‘Oh, this is my sound.’”
