Simon Birch is a self-made artist. He has overcome cancer, won government, corporate and art community support, and now he’s putting on what’s probably our city’s biggest contemporary art show ever. Patrick Brzeski spoke to the irrepressible artist about beating the odds, believing in Hong Kong and why we all need heroes. Portraits by Calvin Sit

Simon Birch is surprisingly at ease when I join him in his cluttered Ap Lei Chau studio on a clear, warm afternoon. For the past three months, he has been working 12-hour days, seven days a week, ramping up to the most ambitious art exhibition of his career. Tall and lean, with angular features, Birch moves around a mannequin with lithe, simian-like fluidity, hot-gluing swatches of foam to the figure. “It’s a bizarre synergy, to have all these people coming together for this show. It’s something that’s very rare for Hong Kong,” he says, smiling. “To have Louis Vuitton, Swire Properties, Diesel, and Shanghai Tang, the Hong Kong government, and all these artists, actors, architects and talented people coming together to do something in the same space – it’s pretty cool.”

Hope & Glory – a Conceptual Circus by Simon Birch is poised to be one of the biggest Hong Kong-born contemporary art shows the city has ever seen. “When I got the space from Swire Properties, that really was the tipping point,” Birch explains. “I thought: this may bankrupt me, but it will be awesome.” Birch’s multimedia art extravaganza – held from Thursday April 8 to May 30 – takes place in the 20,000 square foot non-profit ArtisTree exhibition space in TaiKoo Place. It collects the collaborative work of over 100 Hong Kong and international artists, filmmakers, designers, architects, game designers, actors, woodworkers, costume designers, photographers, technicians and more – all arranged according to a complex conceptual schema contrived by Birch and his curatorial collaborator Valerie Doran.

“I first saw the space a couple of years ago, when they opened it with a Vivienne Westwood retrospective,” Birch says. “I did a big multimedia exhibition in Singapore in 2007 and I had been looking for a way to bring that show to Hong Kong, but other than the Hong Kong Museum of Art, there’s no space of this scale in the city. So when I saw this space, I was amazed,” he explains. “I asked someone that night to introduce me to the Swire guy in charge of managing it.” After a lengthy application process, Birch was granted free use of the space for two months; but he then faced the daunting task of having to realise a vision that until then had always just been a dream ambition. “When I got it, I kinda thought, ‘Shit, now I’ve got to fill this.’”

Simon Birch, an Englishman of Armenian descent, first came to Hong Kong in 1997. Of what brought him here, he says matter-of-factly, “Unemployed, broke, nowhere to go, limited options, no education. And I met a girl and fell in love and when she came to Hong Kong, I followed her here. Of course that didn’t work out, but when I got to Hong Kong I landed a good day job working construction and I thought, maybe, finally, I can get some cash together and go to art school.” The son of an art teacher and graphic designer, Birch began painting at a young age and says he was always certain he would one day become an artist. “But my parents weren’t very successful, hence, no resources, no education.” While working, hustling and DJing parties on the weekends to save money for school, Birch also began staging his own exhibitions around Hong Kong. “What happened is, while I was trying to get my act together to get to school, I started selling work, selling paintings.” Birch is best known for his energetic large-scale figurative oil painting but has since branched out into various media. “And then it kind of snowballed, and I didn’t really need to go to art school anymore,” he says. “Eventually I decided to go ahead with it and did a Masters [at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology], just to try to improve the intellectual side of my work.”

In the winter of 2008, as his career was gaining momentum following the success of his multimedia project in Singapore and a series of painting exhibitions at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Birch was diagnosed with NK-T-cell lymphoma, a rare and commonly deadly form of cancer. As he said in an interview with this magazine in 2008, “I had a battle plan; it was a project to manage. I did Western medicine, Eastern medicine, crazy therapies, nutrition. But of course the heaviest part was chemotherapy and radiotherapy for four months.” For a couple of months, Birch managed to continue working while going for chemotherapy, but eventually became too sick to paint. “I was too debilitated. The radiotherapy was on my head, so I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t talk, it was a horrible thing, constant pain, and I had to take a huge amount of painkillers.”

Obviously Birch survived, his treatment a rare success; but while the cancer is now in remission and he feels fully recovered, it will be several years before his doctors can be 100 per cent certain the tumours will not return. “It’s a hideous, scary thing. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but it does make you grateful for your life’s adventures. Every day is a lot more golden, because you’re still here and you don’t take anything for granted,” he says. “But there’s a sadness to it too, because you realise how temporary everything is. I think that’s a realisation that everyone comes to eventually, but you usually don’t really feel it, until you’re much older.” Whether or not his near-death experience has left any lasting sense of urgency in his art practice, Birch would rather leave to others to decide.

Although he always dreamed of art world success in New York or London, Birch says he’s been happy to build his career in Hong Kong, despite the city’s reputation for being something of a cultural desert – or rather, precisely because of that reputation. “A few years ago, I said to myself, well, if I went to New York, where I’d be one of thousands of artists, I’m not sure whether I’d have any impact,” he explains. “In a really sort of idealistic way, I wondered whether I would be able to make a difference. So I thought, hold on, I’m always complaining about the lack of culture in Hong Kong – saying oh, there’s no music, art, culture, whatever – but maybe if I stay here and contribute, I can actually make an impact.” Because nothing much was happening in Hong Kong, he could be a trail-blazer. “I felt it could be a pioneering endeavour to produce art here – especially on the large scale that I’m doing now. I kinda thought, Hong Kong ain't so bad. Maybe I can be an innovator, or an inspiration, do something positive here.”

The opportunity to realise those long-held ambitions came with the freedom to fill ArtisTree’s 20,000 sq ft space with his vision and the work of his choosing. “The exhibition we did in Singapore was about half that size, so we had to completely reconceptualise the project,” he says. Expense was also a major concern. “I’ve done work at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, where I got zero dollars, even though it cost me a couple hundred grand to make the piece of art for the project [Looking for Antonio Mak, 2008]. I was pretty much resigned to the fact that it would be the same with this exhibition – that I would end up paying for everything out of my own pocket – because there are no art patrons, no sponsorship, and usually no government money in Hong Kong.”

But Birch decided to go through with the process of pursuing government money anyway, mostly out of curiosity. “I found one particular fund that seemed appropriate – the HKSAR Mega Events Fund – which is actually not for art specifically, but for events. But I realised the project that I was proposing was, in fact, an event, it’s a place where people would come and experience something.” The more Birch researched the fund, the more he realised his vision for ArtisTree squarely fit the fund’s parameters. The fund is only open to nonprofit foundations, but Birch just so happened to have a nonprofit arts foundation that he established several years ago, and he had always intended for his exhibition to be a nonprofit event. “It’s all comes down to how you fill out the applications,” he explains. “You have to word it with real clarity and quantify everything that you’re doing – the money you’re spending, the number of people that are going to come, who those people are going to be, how your show is going to benefit Hong Kong’s image as a world city, and all these little things. It took me months to do this, to do the research and really understand it,” he says. “But, well – it worked.”

Birch’s proposal for the Hope & Glory exhibition was the only one to be selected for government funding. He was awarded $2 million to allocate to his exhibition’s budget – an unprecedented coup for an expat artist working in Hong Kong. “I’ve never heard of a Hong Kong artist getting that much government money,” he says, smiling again.

A free 20,000 sq ft space, $2 million funding and a charismatic leader – who wouldn’t want to get on board with that? To match the cash and the space, Birch has secured an impressive local and international roster of collaborators and exhibitors, including such notables as artist Stanley Wong, photographer Wing Shya, British electronic music producers UNKLE, filmmaker Eric Hu, designer Douglas Young, architect Paul Kember, actor Daniel Wu, and Beijing-based artist Cang Xin. Calling in favours with acquaintances and various companies he’s worked with in the past, Birch has also managed to win unique one-off sponsorship deals with Diesel, Louis Vuitton, G.O.D. and Shanghai Tang. “Louis Vuitton, for example, are covering the cost of our lecture series, making sure that the PR is done and coffee is there or whatever,” he says. “Little bits like that, it all helps and it all adds to the overall project.”

On what the exhibition will actually look like, Birch again grows giddy. “The space is so big and black; you’ll feel like you’re wandering through the universe, coming across these weird artifacts.” A sampling of the works viewers will encounter includes: a 360-degree 3D film of a white stallion galloping in slow motion, five black pods that can be entered like fighter plane cockpits with films playing inside, 20 performers wandering around the exhibition space in fantastic Matthew Barney-esque freak show costumes, a small caged living room environment with films playing inside, a parody of American Idol where the contestants are famous artists, a full-scale, ride-able skate ramp with a mirrored surface, a hologram room showing a mysterious figure, a four-metre diameter ball covered in trophies, a stainless steel sculpture showing a face with a long tongue touching the edge of a gigantic sword, and, all told, ten video installations embedded around the space. “The most exciting piece is a massive sculpture which runs through the centre of the exhibition,” Birch says. “It’s basically like huge Las Vegas-style letters were ripped off a building and dropped on the floor. They’re enormous, a few metres high and there are a dozen of them.” The letters were made in the Mainland and shipped to Hong Kong by truck.

“It’s all densely conceptual,” says Birch, “and there’s a reason behind everything.” There are two primary meta-themes to Hope & Glory. “We describe it as a conceptual circus, because it’s a space that the community can share in, where they can experience spectacle and wonder. A circus is a place that is temporary, that comes to town and is built, where all the people of the community can come to share in a spectacle on the same level.” Birch also says he is interested in how the notion of the circus encapsulates the good and evil in the world. “There’s wonder but there’s horror as well; there’s fun but there’s fear too – the trapeze artist who’s beautiful but could fall to her death at any time, the elephants that are so large and wonderful, but have been dragged out of the jungle and are terribly displaced – all in the same space,” he says. “So the exhibition is kind of like a big circus, there are artworks all over the place and, as you wander around, some of them thrill you and some of them scare you and some of them inspire you.”

The second meta-narrative, or underlying myth, of the exhibition seems to have a more personal resonance for Birch: the idea of a hero’s journey. “If you take Luke Skywalker from Star Wars”, he enthuses, “his journey follows a structure, where he goes from his normal farm environment into space with a gang of brothers to do battle with evil, and in the process they learn wonderful things and they go to the edge of death, and in the end he returns with this gift, which is the force and peace to the galaxy.” Obviously a fan of Joseph Campbell, Birch notes that this myth, this structure of the hero’s story, stands behind all of the great epics of the West, be it Star Wars, Homer’s Odyssey, The Wizard of Oz, or even the story of Christ. According to Birch, each work in the exhibition is conceptualised as an individual stage in the Hero’s Journey.

Although he insists it’s entirely accidental, Birch can’t help but notice an autobiographical parallel to the exhibition’s big themes. He says he sees two levels of interest to the exhibition. The first level is the work itself and the aesthetic experience viewers have with it. The second level is the cultural impact: the unprecedented government involvement, the corporate sponsorship, the local and international artist participation, the broad audience Birch hopes the work will reach, and what it all might mean for the future of Hong Kong’s art scene.

“And so, if you think about it, the actual making of the show also follows the structure of the hero’s myth,” he says. “One guy [Birch] makes a choice and crosses the threshold, and suddenly has to gather many people to help, to achieve this result, and the result, which is the exhibition, is shared with humanity, shared with the public for free.”

He’s not quite there yet though, and neither is Hong Kong. Birch believes Hong Kong could soon break through as a first-rate arts city, but it might take another generation or two. “There needs to be a paradigm shift in people’s perception of art and culture,” he says. “It’s a complicated thing and it has to come from everywhere – from the government, from the community, parents, from support systems, like patrons, and all kinds of things that Hong Kong doesn’t really have just yet. It’s changing though. And with all the different parties involved, this exhibition is a symbol of that possible change.”

Near the end of our conversation, I ask Birch whether he feels any added pressure or a sense of responsibility because of all the outside money and support. “Well, I’m grateful to all these people getting involved. Everyone dove in with no promise of reward and that’s really exciting,” he says. “It’s obviously the tax payers’ money, so I feel a real responsibility to give people their money’s worth. At the same time, you have to maintain your integrity as an artist. So I need to make the art that I want to make and throw it out there in the world and hopefully it has a positive repercussion. Of course it could suck and perhaps this will all go down as a huge waste of money. But that’s art. It’s about risk taking.”

Whether Birch is quixotic circus master or bone fide art hero will be apparent when the gallery doors swing open.

Hope & Glory – A Conceptual Circus by Simon Birch, April 8-May 30, ArtisTree, TaiKoo Place. Free.