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Official Artist
Simon Birch
Painter
556,287 views| 168  Posts

kant

I love making art but geez, the crap you have to go through on the way....

The government keep asking us to generate paperwork and accounts, it's draining and extremely difficult. With so many films and sculptures,  with each having it's own complex history and set of costs, and an insane amount of PR to collate, I think all the government funding is going to end up financing the accountant and the lawyer!

They are still worried about number of people coming to the show, even though we are amazed at how popular the show is. I asked the guy at the government to do us a favour and send an email to all the government civil servants and invite them to come see the show, there's about half a million in HK who could desperately use a bit of culture. Imagine how happy they would be to be dragged from their offices and thrown into wonderland for a few hours. He, not surprisingly said no, not their policy, this rule and that. So the government have a half million people to promote the show to, which would see an explosion in daily visitors, which is what they want, but they won't do it because of policy.

Un-fucking believable.

Then we put a little box on the counter for people to drop money in if they felt like it. The show is free to get in but we though the few hundred bucks it brings in would at least pay for the staff lunch box and their bus fares. Some staff are volunteers and some are on minimum wage.

But the property developer that owns the venue banned us from doing it! It apparently is illegal and we have to apply for a license to have a 'donation' box. I asked the accountant about this and he said it was ok to do if it was a 'sponsorship' box because then it wasn't strictly a donation but Swire now want a signed letter from our lawyer confirming this, they won't take our word for it. It'll take a few days to get this from the lawyer, and if we needed a license this would take weeks, by which time the exhibition would be over.

Well, we shouldn't complain because they did give us an amazing venue for free rent. But shit, you should see the cleaning bill they gave us....!

I love this exhibition, and it seems so does everyone else. But never again.....!

sb

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almost 14 years ago 0 likes  1 comments  0 shares

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Languages Spoken
english
Location (City, Country)
Hong Kong
Gender
male
Member Since
September 27, 2007