Simon birch12/13/2023 In another multi-screen video installation, “ Inevitable”, co-created with filmmaker and art director Eric Hu, visitors can watch a stuntman graphically crash Birch's red Ferrari on giant screens as well as gawk at close-up pictures and pieces of the wreckage on display. Take for example the “ The Crusher”, where 300 pitchforks hang menacingly from the ceiling, or the six-channel video named “ Inhumans”, a collaboration with photographer and filmmaker Wing Shya portraying a horde of Chinese men punching each other in slow motion. ![]() The depiction of violence or its aftermath that is palpable in “ Clear Air Turbulence” is shared by many of the exhibition's installations. As Birch explains, this work is a “ perfect symbol and metaphor for the entire project”, namely a journey of upheaval and turbulence that precipitates a process of transcendence and transformation. Titled “ The Barmecide Feast” and built in collaboration with Birch’s architect friend Paul Kember-whose uncle was fittingly Kubrick's chief draftsman-and KplusK Associates, the installation is an exact replica of the bedroom where at the end of the movie astronaut Dave Bowman finds himself lying in bed and is summarily transformed into a star baby. Making their way to the center of this space, they bewilderingly step into the last scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. To get this point across as well as shut out the outside world, upon entering the exhibition visitors are plunged into darkness where they slowly begin to make out a scene of chaos and destruction. With each nation occupying its own “factory” and fiercely competing against one another, and in light of its violent dissolution during the Opium Wars and the subsequent establishment of extraterritorial treaty ports such as Hong Kong, for Birch the quarter is emblematic of a strife-ridden world where violent conflicts both stem from and result in shifting borders and fluctuating barriers. The show takes its name from the quarter in Guangzhou (which the Europeans called Canton) known as “ Thirteen Factories”, a de facto ghetto where foreign merchants were obliged to base their operations in order to trade with China for nearly 150 years during the 18th and 19th centuries. Organized without any institutional support through a non-profit global artist collective that Birch set up and financed with all his savings, the exhibition was created in collaboration with 20 architects, filmmakers and multimedia artists as a “ new, independent paradigm for socially-engaged art.” On a personal level, asides from proclaiming a tumultuous journey from a self-confessed ‘hooligan’ in the English Midlands to a self-taught artist in Hong Kong, it also serves as Birch’s calling card announcing his induction into the global art world in the most monumental fashion. ![]() ![]() Taking up over 15,000 square meters in an empty industrial warehouse in Lincoln Heights on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, Simon Birch’s ambitious project, The 14th Factory, is an immersive, multi-media art experience that takes visitors on an enthralling ride through an otherworldly cosmos of dystopian character and transcendental possibilities.Īlthough the venue is a pop-up art space, the exhibition was a long time in the making, having been conceived eight years ago, right after the British-born, Hong Kong-based artist was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live.
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