MOMENTS OF UNCERTAINTY
Simon Birch
NY Arts Magazine
Oct 6, 2008
NY
Simon Birch, Painting at the Brink of Death 3, 2008. Oil on canvas,
152 x 152 cm. Courtesy of 10 Chancery Lane Gallery
I’m a U.K.-born artist of Armenian descent who’s been living in Hong
Kong for many years. I came there by accident, and was able to make
enough money, working construction, to finance the staging of my
own exhibitions of figurative oil paintings. Within a few years I
was selling well enough to quit the day job and signed with a great
contemporary gallery, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, which I’m still
with today.
Though the bulk of my work is still figurative, large oil paintings,
over the last few years I’ve ventured into film and installation work
culminating in two particularly notable large-scale projects. They
are 2007’s Azhanti High Lightning at Singapore’s Nanyang Academy of
Fine Arts, an installation in seven parts squeezed into a 50-meter
long gallery, and This Brutal House in April of 2008 at 10 Chancery
Lane’s new project space in Hong Kong, a show spread over three
large galleries and divided into many parts. These large multiple
media projects included film, paintings, installation, sculpture,
and performance housed in many different spaces.
I’m interested in ideas of transition, the ambiguous moment between
an initiation and a conclusion. I choose to represent this in an
environment of theater and spectacle. I want the environment where
my works are housed to envelop the viewer, so the process of viewing
becomes experiential. Painting is the foundation of the multiple media
works. I find the labor and energy involved in the oil and pigment
informs those other visual processes. It’s exciting for me to live
in a time where all these mediums are so accessible and possible,
with my imagination only limited by money and space.
I try to give the viewer the experience that I would want from an
exhibition: overwhelming and complex, a spectacle, an adventure and a
visual aesthetic. I work obsessively in my Hong Kong studio spending
half my time painting and the other half, planning and scheming,
designing and coordinating production, or hunched over my Mac editing
film. I’m currently preparing work for a number of upcoming art fairs,
including the Melbourne Art Fair, Shanghai Art fair, and the Armory
show in New York City, as well as producing a large installation
for the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and planning my next solo show,
which will be another multiple medium spectacle.
Further to this I’m finishing an autobiography/documentation in
collaboration with a couple of Chinese photographers, which focuses
on my survival of cancer this year, a condition from which I was
not expected to live beyond a few months, which I’ve now gratefully
overcome.