Biography
Simon Birch is a U.K.-born artist, of Armenian descent, who is a permanent resident of Hong Kong, China.
Although much of his work is and has been large, figurative oil paintings, over the last few years Birch has ventured into film and installation work culminating in some particularly notable large-scale projects: Azhanti High Lightning (2007, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore), This Brutal House (April 2008, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery and Annex, Chai Wan) and the 20,000sq ft multimedia installation ‘HOPE & GLORY: A Conceptual Circus’ (April 2010, ArtisTree, TaiKoo Place, Hong Kong) which represents a new level of integration of Birch’s conceptual, material and aesthetic concerns. These large multimedia projects included film, paintings, installation, sculpture, and performance housed in specifically configured spaces.
Birch is interested in universal ideas of transition, the ambiguous moment between an initiation and a conclusion, the unobtainable now and the future, inevitably crashing towards us. For Birch these ideas translate easily from oil paint, to film, to installations, which engage with myth, history, circus and science fiction, connection and disconnect. He chooses to explore these themes in an enveloping environment of theater and spectacle, where the process of viewing becomes experiential: overwhelming and complex, yet as spectacle and adventure, also approachable.
Birch’s work has been featured and reviewed in many international publications, including Artforum, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, Time Out and the New York Times.
