Story of Simon Birch
People often ask about my inspirations and how I developed @the14thfactory. This is my story...
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Before Instagram, in 2010, post survival, I built a 30,000 sqft multiple media installation, an immersive experience, built with collaborators from many different disciplines.
It cost me $500k, though I got the space cheap, only $10k, thanks to Swire Properties, I couldn’t get any sponsorship, grant, or support other than Louis Vuitton and Diesel who paid for the opening party that 2000 people enjoyed.
I paid for it with my last savings from 10 years of painting but quickly ran out of cash. At the last minute an amazing person, collector of my work (Amanda, a very private person), made up the difference.
It was a very complex show, hard to explain in a short post, but underpinned by a well-known narrative, the monomyth structure (Homer's Odessey, etc). Each part represented an element of that narrative. Call to adventure, hope, fear, heroes and villains, reward, transformation.
It was challenging to build. Film a white horse in the darkness in 3D, a full horror movie in abandoned buildings, a leap from a building, trapeze artists.....
The audience experience was otherworldly, moving through large and small spaces, film and sculpture, compression and expansion, dark and light. Rough around the edges but people loved it.
It was free entry, the location was a little hard to get to, but over 50,000 people came in its one month run. Many would come again and again. Nobody has heard about it outside of Hong Kong, a lot of the art media refused to write about it.
I came out broke, but hey, I did something! Mostly thanks to all these amazing people who said yes when I asked if they would shoot, compose, build, glue, photograph, and on and on.
The creators included Cang Xin, Wing Shya, Stanley Wong, Daniel Wu Josie Ho, Brian 852, Jan Lam, Eddie, Valerie, KplusK, Gary Gunn, Grace, James Lavelle, Prodip, Florian, Robert, Alvina, Douglas Young, Lee Tsui, Rocky, Saho, trapeze artists and a hologram of Lucy McCrae.
Some images of the many works; huge steel letters that spell Tigranes, long-dead Armenian king. A massive sphere, suspended from the ceiling created from thousands of trophies, each embossed with the names of people I love.
It almost bankrupted me, but amazing.
