Simon Birch is a U.K.-born artist, of Armenian descent,
who’s been living in Hong Kong for many years. He came there by accident, and
was able to make enough money, working construction, to finance the staging of
his own exhibitions of figurative oil paintings. Within a few years he was
selling well enough to quit the day job and signed with a contemporary gallery,
10 Chancery Lane Gallery.

Though the bulk of his work is still figurative, large oil
paintings, over the last few years he's ventured into film and installation
work culminating in two particularly notable large-scale projects. They are
2007’s Azhanti High Lightning at Singapore’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, an
installation in seven parts squeezed into a 50-meter long gallery, and This
Brutal House in April of 2008 at 10 Chancery Lane’s new project space in Hong
Kong, a show spread over three large galleries and divided into many parts.
These large multiple media projects included film, paintings, installation,
sculpture, and performance housed in many different spaces.

The artist is interested in ideas of transition, the
ambiguous moment between an initiation and a conclusion. He chooses to
represent this in an environment of theater and spectacle. He intends that the
environment, where the works are housed, envelop the viewer, so the process of
viewing becomes experiential. Painting is the foundation of the multiple media
works. Birch finds the labor and energy involved in the oil and pigment informs
those other visual processes. an artist clearly excited to live in a time where
all these mediums are so accessible and possible, with his imagination only
limited by money and space.

Birch tries to give the viewer the experience that he would
want from an exhibition: overwhelming and complex, a spectacle, an adventure
and a visual aesthetic. The artist works obsessively in his Hong Kong studio
spending half his time painting and the other half, planning and scheming,
designing and coordinating production, or editing film.

Birch is currently showing at the Louis Vuitton Gallery in
Hong Kong, a series of photos and works on paper as a response to his recent
recovery from cancer, a condition from which he was not expected to survive.
Birch also recently produced an installation at the Hong Kong Museum of Art
which includes his latest venture into film.