Creative director and designer, Asher Young, has driven 1,000 guests and 60 performers across London in a parade of vehicles that included a pink firetruck and a stretch limo police car; inflated a 75-foot octopus in the middle of the ocean; put A$AP Rocky through physical and psychological tests on the sales floor of Sotheby’s; enclosed DJ Michael Brun in a video sculpture based on mathematical formulas; developed a 3-D hologram for his own production of Peter Pan; made a man disappear into a puff of feathers; united disparate methodologies for a project festival at a rare book and manuscript library; re-imagined a circus, from the tickets to the toilet paper; filled a Sotheby's gallery with a metric ton of sand and two human lizards; and woven 33,000 milliwatts of light through a garden of trees to represent mycorrhizal networks.
Young founded Challenge Your Imagination (CYI), a creative direction, design and producing studio, which establishes every project’s narrative through a rigorous artistic process to center audiences as the protagonist. “The work is only complete when an audience is present, so if they aren’t included as a character in the show, it won’t be as meaningful,” Young said.
Young became obsessed with magic at the age of five and later started working professionally as a magician in New York City, which taught him how to tell a story and create an experience for his audience. As a kid, lack of interest in trick or treating and a desire to create story driven experiences with unexpected elements led him to build theatrical haunted houses in his grandma’s apartment - even making it rain indoors one year.
Young’s love of creating unique experiences evolved to putting on large-scale shows, installations, and immersive theater at his alma mater Yale, where he studied Computing and the Arts. One project, Nevermore, began with the question, ‘How can a space hold the residue of a fractured mind?’
An immersive haunted house that converted an abandoned building into a representation of Edgar Allan Poe’s tortured psyche and the family members, characters, and ghost stories that inhabit it, “Nevermore was inspired by asking ourselves how to place the audience inside Poe’s psyche - both personally and within the context of his work.”
Young’s undergraduate thesis, Reverie, centered around J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and required the development of original three-dimensional hologram technology in order to accurately represent memory. “The intention of the thesis was to give a backstory to Barrie, who lost his brother at a young age. People understand Peter Pan as being the kid who never grew up, so we took that idea and created a story about a literal child that never grew up in a way that is honest to how memory presents itself. It is ephemeral, intangible, and a little blurry. They’re snapshot memories, not a perfect, pristine image of reality.” To really get the point across in Reverie, Young “had to develop a new technology because otherwise it didn’t feel like an accurate representation of memory.”
In addition to Nevermore, Reverie, and the Harvard-Yale Game celebration featuring the mathematical formula-based video sculpture, he also curated, designed, and produced an interdisciplinary projection festival at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library on Yale’s campus showcasing university research through artistic interpretation. Working with twenty teams of artists and researchers, they collaborated to create pieces on topics as diverse as particle physics, zoology, music theory, fractal geometry, and urbanism.
After Yale, and prior to founding his own studio, Young physicalized the essence of four of Edward Albee’s plays for Sotheby’s as the estate was auctioned off, and re-imagined the design of the Big Apple Circus alongside a team of designers to offer audiences a contemporary experience inspired by the origins of the art form.
The throughline from magic shows and haunted houses to large scale work during his time at Yale, and collaborations with other companies and studios, led Young to found CYI Studio. He has designed a concert to honor the late David Bowie and Prince, featuring TV on the Radio and speaker Questlove, created a light installation inspired by Suzanne Simard's ecological research on resource-sharing networks in forests for the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, and conceived a sailor’s myth and sea shanty that culminated in unfurling that giant octopus in the middle of the Atlantic for Virgin Voyages.
This fall, Young’s creative direction and production design is on tour, bringing together theatre, art, and musical performances for the Korean music collective DPR. He’s also been commissioned to curate a student projection exhibition by Yale University.
Awards: Yale Susan J. Smith Prize for Outstanding Contribution in the Arts