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Across the street from the New York Stock Exchange in Lower Manhattan, the British artist Simon Birch sat in a cavernous room with fireproofed girders, a rickety table and three wobbly office chairs for company. For most of the 20th century, 23 Wall Street was a temple of profit, the sumptuous headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company. For the last decade or so, save for the occasional fund-raising event, it has been a neglected hulk. But Mr. Birch, 41, a tall man dressed in black, with neon-green sneakers and a sweep of dark-blond hair, hopes to restore some of its luster with a huge art installation opening here April 14.
英国艺术家西蒙·伯奇(Simon Birch)坐在曼哈顿下城纽约证券交易所对面一个有防火房梁的宽敞房间里，身边是一张摇摇晃晃的桌子和三把颤颤巍巍的办公椅。20世纪的大部分时间里，华尔街23号都是J·P·摩根公司(J. P. Morgan & Company)奢华的总部，是个赚大钱的地方。而在最近十年左右的时间里，除了偶尔举办筹款活动，这里只是一处被人遗忘的空壳家。伯奇是个高大的男子，41岁，一身黑衣，脚穿亮绿色帆布鞋，暗金色头发，他希望4月14日在这里展出的一件大型艺术装置作品，可以为此地恢复一些昔日荣光。
He is the driving force behind “The 14th Factory,” a $3 million exhibition that will feature his work and that of about 30 other artists and creative types, including architects and filmmakers, who will fill almost 150,000 square feet, over seven floors, with paintings, sculptures, videos and interior landscapes.
伯奇是“14号工厂”(The 14th Factory)展览的策划者，这项耗资300万美元的展览，将展出他与其他大约30位艺术家和创意人士的作品，这些人包括建筑师和电影制作人。他们将填满七层楼高、约1.39万平方米的空间，展品包括绘画、雕塑、视频和室内景观。
The project revolves around vague, sprawling themes like the expansion and collapse of empires. That includes America, whose endless pursuit of growth, Mr. Birch seems to believe, has led to the brink of major change — making the show’s location, right in the heart of the capitalist machine, perhaps all the more dramatic.
展览围绕一些模糊、宽广而散乱的主题展开，例如帝国的扩张与覆灭。其中也包括美国，伯奇似乎相信，美国对发展无止尽的追求导致重大变革即将发生，因此，展览地址选择在帝国主义机器的核心，或许就显得更加戏剧化。
“We’re going to splash down in New York,” he said, resting his rangy frame on the table.
“我们要横扫纽约，”他瘦高的身体靠在桌边，说道。
The scope is dizzyingly ambitious, with other challenges, as well. “There’s a huge art system here going on already, which we’re not really part of, to be honest,” Mr. Birch said. “We’re kind of nobodies.”
展览内容令人极具野心，而且面临其他的挑战。“这里已经有了成型的庞大艺术体系，诚实地说，我们并不是其中的一部分，”伯奇说。“我们是无名小卒。”
That might be true in the United States. In Hong Kong, however, where he has been based since 1997, Mr. Birch is a well-known maker of spectacles.
在美国或许的确如此。然而，伯奇自1997年常驻香港，在那里，他以制造轰动场面闻名。
In 2010, his show “Hope & Glory: A Conceptual Circus” drew over 60,000 visitors in Hong Kong, where at 20,000 square feet it was one of the biggest multimedia shows the city had seen. It included a 3-D film of a white horse and a mirrored ramp that children could skate on, and mixed Mr. Birch’s creations with works from other artists.
2010年，他的展览“希望与荣耀：概念性的马戏团”(Hope & Glory: A Conceptual Circus)在一处约1860平方米的场地举行，这是香港规模最大的多媒体展览之一，吸引了大约6万名观众。展览包括一部关于一匹白马的3-D电影，以及一个带镜子的活动坡道，孩子们可以在上面玩滑板，作品来自伯奇与其他艺术家。
Like “Hope & Glory,” the new installation, which will be up for four to six weeks, will be free to the public. Mr. Birch has set up a nonprofit foundation to support it, and he has sold his paintings to raise initial funds. After its run, much of the art will be auctioned off, with most of the proceeds, he says, going to New York-based youth charities like the Robin Hood Foundation and the Madison Square Boys and Girls Club. An area that includes the bank vault will house a temporary education center, where Mr. Birch hopes to bring students and other visitors to discuss and dissect the artworks.
与“希望与荣耀”一样，这个新的装置将展出四到六周，免费对公众开放。伯奇成立了一个非盈利基金会来支持它，并且卖掉了自己的画作，筹集了首批款项。展出结束后，其中的大部分艺术品将进行拍卖，伯奇说，大部分的收益将用来资助罗宾汉基金会(Robin Hood Foundation)和麦迪逊广场男孩女孩俱乐部(Madison Square Boys and Girls Club)等纽约青年慈善组织。包括银行保险库在内的场地将成为一个临时的教育中心，伯奇希望学生和其他参观者们在这里讨论和分析艺术品。
The intersection of theme and location is striking, but it is just one of a series of serendipities that convinced Mr. Birch that the project was fated to happen: A Chinese urban planner he approached to design a poppy-dappled interior landscape learned the same day that her grandfather had been involved in the opium trade. The lead architect on the project, Paul Kember, could fulfill Mr. Birch’s desire to replicate a set from “2001: A Space Odyssey” because his uncle and great-uncle had worked on the sets for the original film.
展览主题与地点的碰撞令人震惊，不过，这只是伯奇遇到的众多巧合中的一个，它们令他相信这个项目是命中注定的：他曾经与一个中国的城市规划师接洽，设计一个点缀着罂粟的室内景观，当天，这位规划师得知，她自己的（外）祖父曾经参与鸦片贸易。展览的首席建筑师保罗·肯姆博(Paul Kember)可以满足伯奇的愿望，复制出《2001太空漫游》(2001: A Space Odyssey)的一个场景，因为保罗的叔叔和叔祖父就曾在这部影片的片场工作过。
Perhaps most striking, “The 14th Factory” had originally been planned for the James A. Farley Post Office Building, on Eighth Avenue at 33rd Street, but found a home earlier this year at 23 Wall Street — right next door to where Mr. Birch had been living for two years while conceptualizing it.
最惊人的可能要算是，“14号工厂”本来计划在33街与第八大道交汇的詹姆斯·A·法雷邮局大厦(James A. Farley Post Office Building)举办，但是今年（指2015年）年初却在华尔街23号找到了地址――两年前，伯奇构思这个作品的时候，就住在隔壁。
For the artist, though, that sense of inevitability extends throughout his artistic and personal life.
不过，对于这位艺术家来说，这种命中注定的感觉贯穿他的全部艺术与个人生活。
Mr. Birch was born in Brighton, south of London, and grew up in the English Midlands. He moved out at 16, to a rough neighborhood in Leicester, where he started working in bars and clubs as a bouncer and D.J. just as rave culture was exploding. By 18, he was hosting his own raves. As his events became more ambitious, he found he couldn’t handle the financial side and ended up in debt. Violent events surrounded his collapse: His older brother was stabbed and nearly died in front of Mr. Birch. A friend was shot and killed outside a club.
伯奇出生在伦敦南部的布莱顿，在英格兰中部地区长大。16岁那年，他搬到莱斯特一个充满暴力的社区，当时正值锐舞文化盛行一时，他在酒吧和俱乐部当保安和DJ。18岁那年，他开始主持自己的锐舞派对。他搞的活动野心愈来愈大，他发现自己财务方面搞不定，开始负债。后来伯奇的崩溃与暴力难解难分：他的哥哥被人捅刀子，差点死在伯奇面前。一个朋友在俱乐部外遭到枪杀。
“I’m not a gangster, you know? I’m an artist,” he said. “I left, with nothing in my pockets. Literally, I had 50 quid to my name.”
“我不是匪徒，你知道，我是艺术家，”他说。“那时候我兜里什么也没剩下。我名下真的只有50镑。”
He soon found himself in Hong Kong, working in construction. Throughout, even though he had no professional training, he was painting and drawing.
不久后他去了香港，做建筑行业。在那期间，尽管他没受过职业训练，却一直创作油画和素描。
His early work was generally figurative: bodies or large heads floating in space — perhaps falling, perhaps rising — rendered in slash-like brush strokes that conveyed both energy and violence. Friends started asking for portraits, and word spread.
他的早期作品总体来说带有象征意味：身体或巨大的头颅漂浮在空中――可能是下落，也可能是上升――它们用刷子般的笔触绘成，传达出能量与暴力的讯息。朋友们开始索要他的作品，他渐渐有了口碑。
That timing was lucky: The Hong Kong contemporary art scene was still in its infancy, said Valerie C. Doran, a curator who later worked with Mr. Birch on “Hope & Glory” and describes him as “kind of like a pinball — he bumps up against something and reacts to it.”
时机非常幸运：后来曾与伯奇在“希望与荣耀”中合作的策展人瓦莱丽·C·多兰(Valerie C. Doran)说，当时，香港当代艺术场景仍处在蹒跚学步之期。她还形容伯奇“就像弹珠一样，总是撞上什么东西，并且做出反应”。
Things began to happen fast — ”more projects, more work,” Mr. Birch said. He won an Asian art award and considered doing a show in New York or London.
事态的发展开始加速――“更多项目，更多作品，”伯奇说。他获得了一个亚洲艺术奖项，之后开始考虑在纽约或伦敦做一个展览。
“Unfortunately,” he said, “that’s when I got put in my place.”
“当我回到本土，就不那么幸运了，”他说。
In 2008, doctors told him he had a rare, aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and gave him a slim chance of survival. He began a six-month run of chemotherapy and radiation, as well as every form of alternative therapy he could find. He also gathered his friends and told them they were going to be his team.
2008年，他被诊断出患有一种罕见、恶性的非霍奇金淋巴瘤，生存几率极小。他接受了为期六个月的化疗与放疗，尝试各种另类疗法。他把朋友们召集起来，告诉他们，他们就是他的团队。
“It was an incredibly beautiful experience to be surrounded by people that didn’t want me to die,” he said. “It changed me forever.”
“身边围绕着一群不希望我死去的人，这真是非常美好的体验，”他说。“这段经历永远改变了我。”
Five years after his diagnosis, he was told the cancer was in full remission. He began to do charity events, hoping to give back some of the good will he had received. And his paintings changed. “They just became so much looser, and more fluid, and more abstract,” he said. “It was like I had nothing to hold back anymore.”
被诊出患病之后五年，他被告知癌症已经彻底得到缓解。于是他开始做慈善事业，希望能回报自己所得到的善意。他的画风也改变了。“它们变得松弛了很多，更流畅，更抽象，”他说。“就好像我再也没有什么可以保留的了。”
Johnson Chang, a prominent Hong Kong curator and dealer, said he wasn’t impressed with Mr. Birch’s art in itself. “He was doing, frankly, very boring paintings,” he recalled, but “Hope & Glory” captured his attention. “Not entirely because it was a spectacle,” Mr. Chang said, “but I was impressed to see that he had exceeded himself.”
香港著名策展人与交易者张颂仁(Johnson Chang)说，触动他的并不是伯奇的作品本身。“坦率地说，他的画很乏味，”他回忆，但是“希望与荣耀”还是吸引了他的注意。“不完全是因为它是一个大场面，”张颂仁说，“打动我的是，他超越了自己。”
In 2010, Mr. Birch exploded from his figurative work with that show. With its $1 million cost, brash visuals and obscure historical references — one piece spelled out “Tigranes,” the name of an Armenian king (Mr. Birch is partly Armenian by ancestry), in giant, carnival-like letters — it excited the local art scene. Ms. Doran, the curator, who is on the advisory board for “The 14th Factory,” said its interactive elements in particular resonated with a broad audience. “It was really like a living space,” she said.
2010年，伯奇的展览突破了他的象征色彩作品。展览耗资100万美元，充满自信的视觉效果与模糊的历史涵义，其中一幅作品，用巨大的、狂欢般的字体写出“提格兰”(Tigranes)字样，这是一个亚美尼亚国王的名字（伯奇的祖先中有亚美尼亚人），这幅作品令本地艺术圈兴奋不已。策展人多兰目前在“14号工厂”的顾问委员会任职，她说这幅作品的互动元素特别能与广大的观众产生共鸣。“它就像一个活的空间，”她说。
For years, Mr. Birch tried to figure out a sequel of sorts in New York and on a bigger scale. When the post office space fell through, one of his patrons lent him an apartment overlooking 23 Wall Street, and he found himself gazing at the empty building. “The thing was under our feet the whole time,” he said.
多年来，伯奇都试图在纽约推出某种规模更大的后续。那个邮局破产时，伯奇的一个客户租给他一处公寓，从那里可以俯瞰华尔街23号，他在那里望着那栋空空的建筑。“它一直都在我们脚下，”他说。
The show’s title is a reference to the 13 factories, or warehouses, of Canton (now Guangzhou), which in the 18th and 19th centuries were the centers of foreign trade — the Chinese called them “barbarian houses.” But its structure also alludes to the sequence of actions Joseph Campbell described as the “hero’s journey,” or monomyth. At “The 14th Factory,” the visitor is the hero, moving from the everyday into the supernatural, through trials and battles, to emerge victorious and transcendent.
此次展览的名字是指广州的13座工厂或是仓库，在18世纪到19世纪，它们曾是对外贸易的中心，中国人把它们称为“野人屋”。但它的结构也是在暗示一系列约瑟夫·坎贝尔(Joseph Campbell)所谓的“英雄之旅”或称单一神话(monomyth)。在“14号工厂”中，参观者就是英雄，从日常生活中来到超自然的环境，通过考验与战斗，进入胜利与超越的境界。
Viewers will enter into a gallery of portraits of punk rockers from the late 1970s (the “original disrupters,” Mr. Birch said), past videos of bodies in motion (subway dancers filmed so they appear suspended in midair), into a large room of deconstructed airplane parts, culled from a large commercial graveyard in the Mojave Desert. Elsewhere will be a huge laser-cut wood sculpture of an object in mid-explosion, the poppy-topped undulating hills (the grass will be artificial, the poppies real), and more video screens showing real-life Chinese factory workers fighting and a car crash involving Mr. Birch’s Ferrari.
参观者先是进入一个挂满20世纪70年代末期朋克摇滚乐手画像的画廊（他们是“最初的破坏者”，伯奇说），经过一系列播放身体动作的视频（地铁上的舞者，拍摄角度使得她们仿佛悬浮在半空），进入一个大房间，里面是飞机残骸，是从莫哈韦沙漠的一处大型飞机坟场捡回来的。其他展品还包括一座大型激光切割木雕，仿佛在爆炸的样子；一座座点缀着罂粟的起伏的小山（草是人工的，罂粟是真的）；还有更多反映中国工厂工人拼命工作的视频，以及一段反映伯奇开法拉利出车祸的视频。
Once through that violent imagery, visitors will find well over 100 crowns designed by Mr. Birch — empty symbols of victory — and then projections of buildings falling past them, from which they will exit onto the street.
看过这些充满暴力的想像之后，参观者会看到100个由伯奇设计的王冠，它们是象征着胜利的空虚符号，它们后面有建筑的投影，然后观众就可以从出口走到街头。
It’s easy to find references to the Sept. 11 attacks, given the show’s proximity to ground zero, but Mr. Birch said that was unintentional. “I’m not qualified to talk about that event as an artist or as a man,” he said, though Ms. Doran acknowledged that they had discussed it early on.
展览中也很容易看到对911事件的影射，因为展览地点离世贸中心遗址很近，但伯奇说，这并不是故意的。“作为一个艺术家也好，作为一个人也好，我并没有资格讨论那一事件，”他说；但多兰承认，他们曾经讨论过这个话题。
“He’d be easy to criticize if he wasn’t putting a lot of stuff on the line,” said Gary Gunn, a composer who is designing sound for the installation
“如果不是放了许多东西进来，他很容易遭到质疑，”为这次装置设计了声音的作曲家加里·甘恩(Gary Gunn)说。
Mr. Birch is aware that the enterprise, which he hopes to reinvent in Los Angeles and perhaps elsewhere, is risky, both financially and critically.
伯奇还想在洛杉矶或其他地方复现这个作品，但他知道，这在财务上担着风险，也很可能不受好评。
“The truth is, it could be the end of my career,” he said. “I used to work in construction. I’d be happy to go back to that.” He paused. “In theory.”
“真的，它可能是我事业的终结，”他说。“我曾在建筑行业工作，我很高兴回到那个行业。”他顿了一下。“从理论上是这样。”
