{"id":15296,"date":"2025-02-12T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-12T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/?p=15296"},"modified":"2025-02-12T17:03:07","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T17:03:07","slug":"the-man-who-took-gilbert-george-to-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/the-man-who-took-gilbert-george-to-china\/","title":{"rendered":"The man who took Gilbert & George to China"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the 1980s and 1990s, London art dealer James Birch built quite a reputation selling works by British surrealists and emerging young British artists (YBAs) from his Chelsea gallery. Then the globally renowned Francis Bacon agreed to let him arrange an exhibition for him in Moscow in 1988. His memoir of that adventure, Bacon in Moscow<\/em> (Cheerio Publishing, 2022), is both funny and frustrating by turn, and many who did business in China in the 1980s and 90s will appreciate the hoops Birch had to jump through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, i<\/span>n\u00a0Gilbert & George and the Communists<\/em>\u00a0(Cheerio Publishing, 2025), Birch has written of his time promoting the controversial British artists Gilbert & George in, first Moscow, and then, breaking more new ground, Beijing and Shanghai in 1993. That artists whose work tackled such controversial themes and used such (back then) shocking language and materials should be pioneers in China was amazing and unexpected. How did Birch get the idea and the permissions and then actually manage to stage the shows? Ultimately, Birch would achieve major groundbreaking success with the exhibitions and crucially, Gilbert & George would inspire a generation of young Chinese contemporary artists who went on to totally turn the international art scene on its head and place China back on the global art map. Paul French met up with James Birch to remember those times\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Can you briefly explain how the idea of taking Gilbert & George to China in the early 1990s came about? Nobody as controversial had ever exhibited in China before.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

After the success of Gilbert & George in the Soviet Union in 1990, I said to Gilbert & George: \u201cWhere would you like to go next?\u201d They said, \u201cChina. If you can make this happen, we\u2019ll be your best friends for life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I gulped as I had no connections in China, and post-Tiananmen Square, the Sino-British relationship was at an all-time low, but fuelled by the incredible response to the Francis Bacon retrospective and Gilbert & George\u2019s more recent exhibition in Moscow, I took courage in both hands. I asked a friend who had worked in China if he knew anybody I could go and see \u2013 he told me to go to Dublin and look up Brendan Ward who had been the Irish cultural attach\u00e9 in Beijing at the time of the uprising. Brendan recommended that I see Wang Xiaoning in the cultural section of the Chinese Embassy, where this story begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n