Laughing with a Mouth Full of Blood
Over 500 visitors attended the exhibition opening of one Hong Kong’s foremost painters and installation artists, Simon Birch. Over the course of the exhibition, hundreds more would visit, from students to businesspeople, foreigners and locals alike. The exhibition, ‘Laughing with a Mouth Full of Blood’, used the unique heritage building of the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences as a temporary gallery. The use of the Museum was a part of Future Industries’ goal to expand the “white cube” space, in turn, opening new possibilities for showing art in Hong Kong. The search for a space to exhibit the paintings which would work as part of the show rather then outside the show was a conscious one and the Museum of Medical Sciences was a perfect fit. Originally, the museum was a bacteriological institute, a place where the human body was explored and studied; just so, Simon Birch explored and studied the human body through the intricacy of his paintings, paintings which challenge the tendency of modern science to treat the human body as an abstraction.In, Laughing with a Mouth Full of Blood, large figurative oil paintings integrated Birch’s figurative art into a broader meta-narrative of scientific development, to suggest that the human body can never be reduced to pathological object or made to fit a rigid conceptual grid. In ‘Laughing with a Mouth Full of Blood’, Birch returned to his roots of oils and canvas with a collection of large scale figurative paintings. The works which were presented at the Museum are Birch’s most abstract and ambitious to date. Birch extends his exploration of the human body in figurative paintings that tilt into abstraction, conveying fragility and resilience, movement and mindfulness. These ambitious new works, characterized by Birch’s distinctive paintwork, map the complex intertwining of pain and pleasure, aversion and desire, decay and growth. The subjects of Birch’s deconstructed portraiture, poised between action and reflection, intimate vulnerability and the threat of human dissolution, even as they hint at the body’s capacity to resist the abstracting gaze of modern science.
