Hope & Glory Beijing
Simon Birch’s multi-media installation HOPE & GLORY is an immersive environment that invites the audience to embark on a journey into a metaphorical world created by the artist. Described by Birch as a ‘conceptual circus’, the exhibition comprises a series of interlinked installations that transform the space of the gallery into a mythological labyrinth, where cultural and personal histories intersect and collide.
Just as the archetypal circus brought together spectacular ‘sideshows’ from all over the world to create a multi-sensory allegory of foreign adventure, in HOPE & GLORY Birch has realized his vision through artistic collaboration with designers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, actors, gaming wizards, and architects, from Hong Kong and abroad. Among Birch’s collaborators are artist Stanley Wong (anothermountainman), photographer Wing Shya, British rocker James Lavelle, filmmaker Eric Hu, designer Douglas Young, architect Paul Kember, actor Daniel Wu, and New York composer Gary Gunn.
Birch’s vison of the ‘conceptual circus’ includes the idea of the circus as a travelling spectacle whose components change and re-form according to new conditions of time, space and inspiration. First created in Hong Kong in 2010, HOPE & GLORY transformed a 20,000 square foot into a gigantic labyrinth of 18 linked installations, which included larger-than-life features such as stylized circus tents, a ‘freak show’ and a gigantic mirrored skateboard ramp. For HOPE & GLORY Beijing, Birch has reimagined his circus within the multiple galleries of G-Dot Art Space. Here Birch presents a more streamlined HOPE & GLORY, allowing greater emphasis to be placed on the most powerful core installations. At G-Dot, he also introduces a strong element of painting into the installation, incorporating several of his new works whose compositions reveal a sense of layered construction and a vivid—at times almost garish– colour palette that hint at integral links between the aesthetic vocabulary of his new paintings and the multi-media narratives of HOPE & GLORY.
