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 (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.
Now, in Gilbert & George and the Communists (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….
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.
After the success of Gilbert & George in the Soviet Union in 1990, I said to Gilbert & George: “Where would you like to go next?” They said, “China. If you can make this happen, we’ll be your best friends for life.”
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’s 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 – he told me to go to Dublin and look up Brendan Ward who had been the Irish cultural attaché 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.
In 1993, the long shadow of state-mandated Socialist Realism still constrained Chinese art, and local artists who used any of the more controversial motifs in their work, similar to those of Gilbert & George, still faced fines, arrest and self-criticisms. How did you persuade Beijing to let Gilbert & George in?
It was an extraordinarily quick process. Given the incredible restraints on Chinese artists of the time, I felt I had a one in ten chance of getting this exhibition agreed upon. Gilbert & George had a punk attitude and were fearless in their use of images and cultural references, which were often seen as controversial, even by a so-called ‘enlightened’ 20th-century audience. However, the optimist in me hoped that the Cultural Ministry would recognise the influence of social realism on their work and respond in the affirmative. I took with me the catalogue of the Moscow exhibition, which I hoped would reassure them that G&G had valid “communist credentials’. We’ll never really know what made the difference, but a week after visiting Mr Wang, they had rubber-stamped the exhibition. In retrospect, I feel that they saw it as an opportunity to show the West that they were open to new ideas and wanted to build relationships with us quite simply to expand their economy.
Previously, you had taken Francis Bacon and Gilbert & George to Moscow in the days of the old USSR. Both attracted huge audiences. Was it the same in Beijing and Shanghai in 1993 and do you have a sense of who came – artists, students, regular people?
You are absolutely right! It was mainly artists, students, officials, Beijingers and Shanghaiers. The exhibition was a big deal and was constantly packed in both cities. Steven Spielberg came, too! To this day, I have no idea how or why.
Many Chinese artists of a certain generation – those born in the 1960s – have written about how inspired they were by the 1993 Gilbert & George exhibitions. While taking Gilbert & George to China was obviously going to attract a lot of media attention to them and their work, did you also anticipate how important the visit was to struggling Chinese artists in the years before the great boom in Chinese contemporary art?
I didn’t realise that there were so many young artists who wanted to have exhibitions in Beijing. What was generally on show was state-funded art. While I was there, a young artist decided to cut his hair in front of the exhibition to protest that Western artists were being shown as opposed to Chinese artists. I’m afraid to say that he was arrested, and we never knew his fate.
During the days of the exhibition, I didn’t fully comprehend its impact. It wasn’t until post-Shanghai and after a visit to Hong Kong, where I met David Tang, who impressed upon me how significant he felt this moment was. David was an amazing collector of Chinese social realist paintings but also Chinese underground art. His collection was exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1997-98. Charles Saatchi bought most of it, and that is when the West began to take a serious interest in the contemporary art of China.
Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, two major Chinese performance artists, have written about how, in 1993, they were struggling – being fined, hassled by the cops, unable to show their work. Zhang has said that Gilbert & George inspired him to double down and continue performing. Ma has said that meeting Gilbert & George in Beijing and seeing what two artists who started out as performance artists could achieve was the major turning point in his career. Did either you or Gilbert & George have any sense of the impact you were having on the local art scenes in Beijing and Shanghai back in 1993?
We visited China in the days of heavy censorship. There was no internet or social media. Unlike Moscow, which is only four hours away from the UK and shares Europe’s cultural heritage, China felt a world away. It was much harder to meet people, we were never invited to people’s houses, and a frank exchange of views was impossible. I know that Gilbert & George visited a number of artists in their studios which was a first. Even now, it’s thrilling to learn of their impact on artists such as Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming.
And finally, what do you think Gilbert & George got out of visiting China? And you yourself? What was the biggest contrast between Beijing and your previous experiences in Moscow?
My fascination with China began when I was ten years old. I wrote a letter to the Chinese Embassy, asking for a copy of the Little Red Book. Chairman Mao was something of a hero of mine. Twenty years later, the USSR was beginning to disintegrate – it had the feel of an empire falling. Beijing, in contrast, was at the start of an economic revolution, albeit with a communist edge. I was amazed to discover that McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut were already in situ – it was so different from the culture I was expecting.
I can’t really speak for Gilbert & George, but it’s clear even now that they remain constantly interested in the new and unusual and are passionately committed to taking art to the people. After all, one of their most famous slogans is ART FOR ALL.
