Hong Kong artist Simon Birch makes a grand New York entrance
Pop-up installation show serendipitously found a home in former Wall Street headquarters of J.P. Morgan, which has been turned into exhibition space with help from Hong Kong architect Paul Kember
There is no shortage of beautifully designed art galleries in New York, but Hong Kong-based British artist Simon Birch was looking for a completely different setting to the usual white cube experience for his ambitious, large-scale public-art installation featuring his own works and those of 19 other artists.
The original, cavernous site at the James A. Farley Post Office Building, opposite Penn Station, had fallen through at the last minute and the project was on the verge of being cancelled when he found what appears the perfect location right on his doorstep. While Birch was searching for an alternative space large enough to accommodate the collection of monumental works, an agent pointed out that the artist was living in an apartment directly above J.P. Morgan & Company’s historic headquarters at 23 Wall Street, across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. The 102-year-old building below had been empty for 10 years.
“It was pure serendipity in that there was one window of time where we could use the building, as it’s not normally available for a pop-up event like ours. So we got an amazingly reasonable deal and a lot of flexibility with terms,” Birch says.
He says the Wall Street location – with its memorable history, from the invasion of the Dutch in the 17th century, the slave trade, the liberation of America (“George Washington became first president across the street from our space”) and then the recent history of finance, greed and corruption – tied in brilliantly with the exhibition’s exploration of cycles of civilisation, collapse and the unknown future.