Kunsthalle Kowloon

Text by Robin Peckham

In light of the aesthetically offensive content, no images will be posted with this essay.

When I wrote that Simon Birch and his most recent exhibition, Hope and Glory: A Conceptual Circus, had proved divisive within the Hong Kong art community, I was perhaps overly generous. At that point I had not heard a single positive comment about the project, but I wanted to wait for the international crowd to take a look during the art fair before rounding out my own opinion. I have still yet to hear even one private remark in support of Hope and Glory, but the level of discussion in the literature has been disappointing. So it is that, with this short essay, I hope to launch a real conversation over the possible merits of this work. The time has come to take a stand: Simon Birch is out to singlehandedly destroy the integrity of the Hong Kong art world–and the exhibition is awful too.

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I would voice none of these complaints if the same exhibition were touted as a product launch or some nice fashionable party backdrop. But here the sacrosanct name of art is invoked, not in collaboration with some brand or marketing strategy, but purely and independently. The notion of spectacle, especially when devoid of rigorous conceptual content, has become rather passe in the art world, although this remains a question of taste and preference more than anything else. Taste may be something this exhibition lacks severely, but the more important critique lies rather with the way this strategy is deployed with cursory references to “art history” (see, for example, a video of Marcel Duchamp and other artists on an American Idol set, paired with a mock documentary of friends recalling a dead artist, or the color of a sign chosen to represent that of the car in which Jackson Pollock ended his life). The implication is that paying lip service to the realm of art automatically entails participation in that discourse, when in fact the forms of this carnival environment would be much more at home as the backdrop of a street style boutique; if this is what Simon Birch is looking for, I applaud him.

But the fact is, many components of the exhibition barely register as art. Entering the space, the viewer is blessed with the Latin phrase “all is forgiven,” before being lead past a three-dimensional board in the shape of a star covered with lightbulbs. So far, this is little more than a tourist trap–which would be amusing, if there were the slightest hint of critically detached irony involved. But Birch’s painfully embarrassing earnestness is revealed as he describes the multitude of beginnings and endings available to his “adventure,” symbolized by the rote repetition of short videos composed of the opening and closing clips of some hundred science fiction movies, framed within black and white “pods” situated at the entrance and exit to the exhibition space, respectively. Although it is often a saving grace, this nod towards ambiguity here fails miserably. Likewise, a hologram portrait appears to be included for the technical wow-factor alone, while a metallic halfpipe open to skateboarders is justified by virtue of its reference to “actual risk.”

Elsewhere, Birch appears to be vapidly borrowing from or outright repeating already well-known artistic projects. In an installation and accompanying videos he describes as a “freak show,” actors wear Seussian costumes that come dangerously close to low fidelity imitations of artist Nick Cave’s infamous “soundsuits.” Near the end of the exhibition, surrounding a horrendously tacky meteor composed of trophies labelled alternately with the titles of all of Birch’s works and the names of his loved ones, an apocryphal quote attributed to Queen Elizabeth (“All my possessions for a moment of time”) is inscribed in a reflective sheet on the floor, recalling nothing more than a Jenny Holzer truism. In another installation, an amateurish video shot in Halo 2 ignores the history of machinima as a well-established if grassroots medium, preferring to quote the highlights of canonical art history in a poor caricature of Cory Arcangel.

In other areas, it is the heavy-handed symbolism that ruins what could have been the joy of a pleasantly entertaining experience. Signs consisting of hundreds of lightbulbs in agglomerations taller than the average visitor spell out the name of an ancient emperor, serving as a reminder that all things come to pass. Hanging models of spaceships from a variety of cinematic allusions (Star Wars figures prominently) hurtle towards their doom in a pile of dust in which their fossilized remains are visible. One can only hope that the works in the exhibition would meet with such a fate, but as of this writing Birch has removed the entire installation to storage, where it awaits the attentions of “any museum anywhere in the world,” in his words, to which he is prepared to lend it at no cost.

An open-minded analysis of the exhibition might reveal that many of the forms contained therein are actually remarkable similar to the twin visual strategies of the pop and the gaudy in Chinese contemporary art (in particular, the genre described as “big, red, and shiny”), but here the iconography is instead derived from the somewhat dirtying experience of gleefully hanging on to a few threads of global pop culture in post-handover Hong Kong. That is to say, Birch evinces no conception of art as an openly defined field and clearly has no respect for its lineages, trajectories, or boundaries; instead, art is understood only as a somewhat flippant rehashing of already clichéd popular tropes. He approaches the activity of exhibition-making with no respect for context and no obvious interest in the modes in which such works are produced across the world today, choosing instead to work on hearsay and within a small coterie of like-minded “creatives” while shamelessly working under the name of art.

The knee-jerk reaction here is to proclaim Simon Birch the ultimate outsider artist for a new generation, gesturing wildly towards his personal history of self-education and omnipresent working class hero complex. Unfortunately, this defense fails to apply these days: now that Birch has spent so many years working within the art world in Hong Kong, painting professionally with the financial support of a previously more coherent commercial gallery that has built up quite a waiting list for commissioned work from the artist, he can no longer feign ignorance to the workings of these institutions. There is no excuse for the rapacious eyes with which he approaches this system, evidently hoping to plunder its glories while leaving only plastic trash behind.

Beyond these issues of content and aesthetic interest, a major sticking point for many observers has been the problem of attribution. The press materials refer generically to an “exhibition by Simon Birch,” slyly suggesting by omission that this is neither a solo exhibition nor a curatorial effort. Other materials credit a list of collaborators numbering no less than twenty, the more luminous of which include local sculptor Kacey Wong (who does not appear to contribute work to the exhibition_, artist and designer anothermountainman, designer and G.O.D. mastermind Douglas Young, and fashion photographer Wing Shya. The trademark video style of the latter, recently showcased in a fantastic moving portrait of Maggie Cheung for Rodarte, appears to surface in a few areas, notably in a multi-channel video installation of a galloping white horse that Birch rather bluntly describes as “representing death,” and perhaps elsewhere in the paid of videos depicting a young woman jumping from the top of a building and, bringing the exhibition full circle, jumping up into the air from solid ground (though it may very well be the case that Wing was not, in fact, involved in any of these productions). The contributions of James Lavelle’s pop band UNKLE are also evident in the soundtracks to many of these videos, but perhaps no collaborative effort is as obvious as the sculpture offered by Beijing artist Cang Xin, whose steel head is welded into position licking an enormous knife.

These strange and varying models of collaboration suggest an unclear origin story for the project as a whole, and one that positions Simon Birch as an exhibition designer more than anything else. It may be impossible to determine from the outside precisely which installations and videos originated from his own conceptual mandate, but the evidence nonetheless calls for a heightened acknowledgement of these other participating artists, designers, and musicians within the ego-driven megalomaniacal carnival Birch has created. The issue of funding appears in a similar light: if not nearly as controversial as last year’s Louis Vuitton exhibition in the Hong Kong Museum of Art, a handful of local artists were quick to point out the government’s financial contribution to the exhibition from the “mega-events fund.” More interesting might be the form of mathematics Birch employs in his own statement regarding the show, claiming that the production cost reached almost HKD$15 million, but eventually only required some HKD$4 million due to unnamed sponsors–this balance was covered half with government funding and half with personal contributions from “friends.”

The only serious figure within the local art world to publicly defend this debacle so far has been Valerie Doran, a curator and scholar with otherwise impeccable taste and rigorous critical judgement, here responsible for curatorial work and the attendant “educational program.” Her major claim on behalf of the project is that Simon Birch can serve as an antidote to the overly intellectual insularity of the Hong Kong art scene. There are certainly many things wrong with our local art ecology, but this could hardly be counted as one of them. In terms of intellectual art-making, Hong Kong is hardly New York: the past few decades have given birth to increasingly pedantic strains of conceptually referential visual art–some certainly more enjoyable than others–but little of this has reached our shores. Hong Kong artists are concerned more than anything else with the diminutive realities of the everyday and the politics of the personal, and their social and intellectual circles are some of the most open in the world. In very few cities can observers and visitors engage leading artists openly and critically in person and in public; indeed, it seems that only Birch himself has excused himself from this model, infamously aloof at his own receptions.

In the wake of the blockbuster Louis Vuitton-sponsored exhibition A Passion for Creation and coming just as the new executive of the West Kowloon Cultural District is installed in the city, this project has the potential to cause unimaginable damage to the nascent Hong Kong art system. It further polarizes the rarely overlapping circles of international galleries and local artists, vocally insisting through its own “uniqueness” on the invalidity of the already-existing discourse of local art and identity. It sides with film, fashion, and design, bringing these sexier cousins into the art world during a period of high international visibility–further burying the already overlooked discussions of art proper in Hong Kong. Ultimately, it is Simon Birch himself who will suffer when the category “Hong Kong artist” is elided due to his efforts, absorbed into the fragmentary rhetorics of “digital creatives” and “Chinese contemporary.” In its willful distance from current international understandings of these relationships, Hope and Glory presents a shockingly immature narrative of contemporary culture that threatens the very emergence of responsible and self-conscious art movements, driven by the vehicles of marketing and public relations rather than those of artistic quality.