The Birth of Colour

February 5, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Auguste and Louis Lumière never imagined in the early 1900s, when they were trying to solve a problem that had bedevilled the photographers of the black-and-white era for more than 70 years, that potatoes would be part of the solution. It would also equally surprise to the French brothers that, 113 years after they launched their game-changing invention – the Autochrome process – in a quest for natural-looking colour in photographs, it would still be one of the most popular filters on Instagram, designed to evoke nostalgia by giving photos a vintage feel.

The Autochrome colour imaging process represented a revolution in photography. Technical limitations had previously made colour photography extraordinarily complex and very time-comsuming; the Lumière brothers, already producers of black-and-white camera-ready plates, overcame that problem using ground potato starch, which they dyed orange-red, green and blue-violet. They then spread the particles over a glass plate coated with a sticky varnish, following up with black carbon powder to fill any gaps between the grains. After applying pressure with a roller and then a second coat of varnish, the resulting plate was a three-coloured filter screen, coated with about four million transparent starch grains per square inch. The brothers then applied a final panchromatic emulsion to the plate.

In doing so, they made colour images a whole lot easier to capture. Before the camera-ready Autochrome plate, photographers needed to set up three cameras, record separate images and superimpose them one over the other to form a single picture. The commercial viability of the Lumière Autochrome process hastened its adoption across Europe.

The way the technique renders colour is similar to a pointillist painting, but it creates a gentler tone with a softer, warmer feel; images created using Autochrome resemble newly discovered relics from the past. They represent a stark contrast to the often bright, exaggerated colours of later colour photographic methods, which tended to produce garish, unnatural tones.

All’s Fair in Art

January 8, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

In the blink of an eye, Art Central has evolved – from playing the David to Art Basel’s Goliath to becoming a dynamic cornerstone of Hong Kong Art Week. Timed to coincide with Art Basel’s Hong Kong edition, the UOB-sponsored satellite show, which presents more than 100 galleries, has started to find its own voice, look and feel. This year, Art Central returns from March 18 to 22. In short, it’s developing a platform to showcase next-generation talent from Asia’s most innovative galleries, with an eclectic and highly collectable group of global galleries and artists.

In that vein, Hong Kong-based curator Kyle Chung will oversee the fair’s acclaimed public art sector, Projects, which features the work of new-media artists selected for their innovation in aesthetics, medium, content and/or context. Chung most recently curated Ellen Pau: Time After Time Will Tell in Singapore and #You #Me #OurSelfies at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre. Projects will comprise large-scale installations and immersive experiences, all  looking to break the boundaries of traditional art-fair fare. 

Once again, the fair will collaborate with Asia Society Hong Kong as its education partner. This year heralds the launch of Live at Art Central, which explores topical themes in contemporary art through talks and Q&As with some of the region’s most celebrated visual artists, curators, influencers, KOLs and cultural game-changers. 

Ensuring consistency in brand and theme, Australia’s Sydney-based 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art returns as the fair’s performance partner for 2020, with a far-reaching programme that explores contemporary art practice in the wider Asia region and includes projects by Chun Yin Rainbow Chan (Australia), Amitesh Grover (India) and Once and Again (Hong Kong). 

This year’s edition also sees the fair’s director, Corey Andrew Barr, take over the reins. An art-world veteran and a Hong Kong resident, he has worked as a specialist in contemporary art at the Phillips auction house and as director of a prominent Hong Kong gallery. His local knowledge should keep the fair in balanced hands as its popularity continues to spread. 

Shall We Dance?

November 13, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Part of Carol Bove’s Hong Kong show at David Zwirner 

If female artists have struggled to wrest the spotlight from their male peers, consider the lot of Carol Bove (pronounced “bo-vay”), who makes heavy, intense sculptures forged out of stainless steel in a Brooklyn-based studio, which she then crushes and paints in vibrant colours, resulting in an elegant, fabric-like finish. Such is the challenge of this modern-day Her-phaestus, whose inaugural Asia show Ten Hours (until December 14 at David Zwirner at H Queen’s in Hong Kong) is attracting conspicuous buzz. 

Bove’s trajectory has been steep since emerging in the early 2000s, exhibiting at many of the world’s major institutions and prominently featuring in both the 2019 and 2017 Venice Biennales. She’s collected by culture vultures such as Adrian Cheng; the New World Development executive vice-chairman has one of Bove’s works displayed at his K11 Musea art/retail mall in Tsim Sha Tsui. 

The surface tension and ugly/beauty trickery Bove invokes and subverts is much of her appeal. To witness her hulking works in the flesh – or, rather, metal – is a revelation. The nuanced, poetic and feminine qualities of her sculpture stand in stark contrast to the labour-intensive circumstances of their production. 

“One thing about these works is that they contain a lot of force,” says Bove, who chooses her words with care, as if executing dance steps. “But the resulting power you see can be very tender. I want the touch to appear very light and soft.” 

One such piece is the powerful, large-scale sculpture Offenbach Barcarolle (2019), the title of which refers to Jacques Offenbach’s final opera, The Tales of Hoffmann (1881). It espouses material and visual alchemy; what appears as awkward, bulky contradiction on cursory glance soon softens, succumbs and attains musicality, dance or even romance. 

Digital Dependency

November 13, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

There are more smartphones in the world than there are people and the device’s proliferation is outpacing the growth of the human population, according to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union. The inability to switch off has become one of the most important and pressing issues of our time. It has been estimated that, in Britain, people check their smartphones every 12 minutes, when taken as an average over a 24-hour period. 

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings named the company’s biggest competitor: not Amazon or YouTube, but sleep. He explained, “We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.” There’s so much competition, it can seem as if there are not enough hours in a day to actually stop and sleep. And when we’re sleep-deprived, our ability to pay attention reduces drastically and our productivity drops, creating new economies around self-tracking devices and other sleep aids. 

So great is the problem that it’s considered a public health epidemic. As of last month, 5.13 billion people in the world owned mobile devices – 66.5% of the world’s population. And it’s growing. Generation Z (people born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s) is the demographic that owns the most smartphones; some 98% own a smartphone and 52% claim it is their most valuable asset. 

It’s estimated that an average person spends two hours and 52 minutes per day on their mobile device. About 22% of users check their phone every five minutes. So it’s not just an epidemic – it’s also an addiction. 

In London until February 23, 2020, Somerset House’s latest exhibition 24/7, inspired by the book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by essayist Jonathan Carey, takes visitors on a journey through five zones based on the tensions of life in a non-stop world. New technologies have blurred the boundaries between day and night, activity and rest, the human and the machine, work and leisure, and the individual and the collective. 

Interestingly, the beginnings of this 24/7 culture can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution, with workers being rostered around the clock. The distinction between day and night effectively eroded, disrupting the body’s natural rhythms – and that has intensified during the Information Age. 

Early examples of the phenomena include Joseph Wright of Derby’s Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night (1782), in which he painted a Derbyshire cotton mill owned by Richard Arkwright, inventor of the modern factory. It is believed to be one of the earliest depictions of British 24/7 culture, with workers made to do shifts around the clock. 

It’s a reminder of how the split between business and leisure time has blurred, with more homeworkers and more coffee shops becoming working hubs than ever before. Once touted as the future of employment, the current gig economy has proven a honey trap for some; despite the illusion of greater flexibility and freedom away from the office, the reality can be quite precarious, requiring more time for work and less for rest and relaxation. It often leaves individuals in isolation, rather than part of a collective who can convene to champion workers’ rights. 

Roman Signer’s Bett (1996) shows a film of the Swiss artist asleep on his bed as a remote-controlled helicopter frenetically swoops and hovers above his head. Tatsuo Miyajima’s Life Palace (Tea Room) (2013) is a meditative isolation chamber, through which the Japanese artist invites people to climb and, within the blue glow of blinking LED numbers, drink in the passage of time. 

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s Somnoproxy (2019) is a futuristic story in which someone offers services to sleep on behalf of wealthy executives who are too busy and stressed to get any sleep for themselves. Visitors are invited to lie down in a large hotel bedroom and experience this sonic escape from reality. 

British artist Mat Collishaw’s The Machine Zone 00-01 (2019) sees six animatronic birds move inside glass boxes, exploring the idea of random reward. The concept highlights the algorithms driving social media interactions and has been linked to our likelihood to become addicted to them. 

And Australian artist Tega Brain reveals the hacks to cheat fitness-tracking devices such as Fitbit in her project Unfit Bits (2015). The simple DIY strategies trick wearable technologies into believing that people have engaged in more physical activity than they have, helping to produce data to qualify them for incentives from employers or insurers, even if they can’t afford a high-exercise lifestyle. Unfit Bits’ hacks highlight the unreliability of such data streams – ones on which we seem to increasingly depend. 

Oink, Oink 

October 30, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Reality Bytes

October 16, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Chen Wei, In the Waves (2013), photograph on lightbox

Despite its futuristic fame, the Fritz Lang-directed sci-fi film Metropolis (1927) was only a small part of it. The rise of industry and money and man’s role – with the masses working as slaves for the ruling elite in a mega-city – formed the mainstay. With its art-deco urban landscape, futuristic skyline and obsession with technology’s potential to create machines that might soon replace human beings, the visionary film pre-empted the zeitgeist and now feels, a century later, like a trophy moment for today’s digital analytics.

In one of the film’s crowning sequences, Maria (played by Brigitte Helm) undergoes a Frankensteinian DNA-sequencing transmission as if by virtual hula hoop, wakes as an electronic diva – a female C-3PO who appeared 50 years before Star Wars – and dances a veiled, minxy, sinuous routine that’s so Mata-Hari-esque, the corpses of the Seven Deadly Sins rise in unison to play musical instruments in thrall to her seductive sheen and glossy exotica. Lang does for cinema what Mary Shelley did for literature. 

Lang, it transpires, was influenced by seeing New York in its nascent period of modernisation: “The film was born from my first sight of the skyscrapers in New York in October 1924… the buildings seemed to be a vertical sail, scintillating and very light, a luxurious backdrop, suspended in the dark sky to dazzle, distract and hypnotise.”

Metropolis was the preface to what would become cyberpunk. The genre, from the outset, has depicted radical technological advances – plugged-in consciousness, androids that are indistinguishable from people – and worlds divided by unequal access to wealth and resources, where the multinational corporations, the sovereign states, the hackers, and the criminal underworld all vie for control. 

2019 is the year when numerous iconic cyberpunk films including Blade Runner (1982) and Akira (1988) are set. After decades of cyberpunk influence across a broad range of visual and written culture, the new Hong Kong exhibition Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future (until January 4, 2020 at JC Contemporary in Tai Kwun), considers the hold that the genre retains on our collective imagination by assessing how its tropes have bled into art and visual culture. It also explores and revisits how the genre’s aesthetics and futurisms can be seen from Hong Kong, one model of the “meta-city” – a sprawling urban space that’s just as virtual as it is real. 

Cyberpunk has indirectly affected (and often reflected) Hong Kong’s visual culture, but through refractions of novels, movies and, in particular, anime, its influence has been pervasive. The present also offers a particular prism: how the cyber-metropolis has shifted from a fantastic metaphor for life in the future into an inescapable, looping present.

Far from having become outdated, cyberpunk’s dystopian scenes – its protagonists, networked and yet isolated, navigate neo-noir city streets that are illuminated by the glare of commerce – look like an average night on the town in 2019, whether you’re in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Tokyo or Jakarta. Like so much that was once seen as pre-millennium “cyber” or “virtual” – as outside of us, a separate and distinct terrain to be explored or conquered in a neo-colonial fashion – the realms of cyberpunk have begun to seem less like an otherworldly plane and more like a funhouse mirror of our world, lives and histories. 

As part of the exhibition, Hong Kong-based art collective Zheng Mahler’s 2019 installation Nostalgia Machines highlights how Asian urban spaces continue to be evoked through techno-orientalist fantasies of the West, but also in the dystopian imagining of the future in Japanese popular culture such as anime. 

Meanwhile, Japanese photographer Takehiko Nakafuji’s Nightcrawler, Hong Kong, Tokyo, a visual representation of a city’s deformation and regeneration that was shot post-2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster and pre-2020 Tokyo Olympics, reflects on Japan’s capital city. “Tokyo continues as a demon city of swirling energy, an ever-transforming monster, spinning out of control,” he posits. “Everything is nihilistic chaos.” 

Korean artist Lee Bul’s After Bruno Taut, at once ancient and futuristic, shows us that utopia and dystopia are often one and the same. Note how she equates the material transparency (shimmering glass skyscrapers) with invisible corporate power and a pervasive surveillance society where no one can hide. 

Poster Nation

October 3, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

As mass media in the early 20th century became the visual language of political poster art, colourful and artful propaganda posters accompanied almost every event or development that took place for more than three decades in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949. The posters, which espoused a kind of “total art”, functioned like a new iconography that accompanied the nation’s transition into a modern socio-political structure, serving a national purpose and an aspirational need. They also gave expression to many different types of policies and many different visions of the future that the Chinese Communist Party looked to over the years. 

The arts have played a vital role throughout history in the Chinese system and been used to spread messages on “correct” behaviour and thought. Mao Zedong believed the social content of art should dictate form. His 1942 talk at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art urged revolutionary artists to utilise folk art forms of the peasant class to bring about change in the countryside. For Mao, art wasn’t intended to be an ecosystem of intellectuals, elites and so-called literati, but something for the masses. Clarity, directness and simplicity became the mantra for his social realism. 

The purposes of the posters were manifold; they were intended to mobilise, inform, congratulate, inspire, instruct and appease the people. They had reach, too. Large numbers of illiterate people could understand them, which meant the Party had a visual means of educating the people – and a very dynamic one at that, paraded as the posters were in offices, factories, dormitories and houses.

The overriding message was to portray the future in the present, not only showing life as it really was but also life as it ought to be – an artful commingling of fact and fiction. It presented a future in which women were prominent, having equal rights with men, being able to vote (1953), and just as likely to fly to the moon or join the army and fire rockets alongside their male counterparts. Thus, beyond the slogans printed on the posters, the visual content evoked an aspirational lifestyle or universalism – the promise of a bountiful future not just for China, but also for the world.

The posters were popular for their composition and visual content, to the extent that many people didn’t pay much attention to the Maoisms printed underneath. In such a way, the political message of the posters was passed on in a subconscious manner. Much of that was due to the visible seduction of the works, conjured as they were by talented artists commissioned to depict political trends of the moment. Many had been commercial calendar designers in the 1930s before the founding of the PRC and were familiar with the ways of advertising; their careers had risen alongside Shanghai’s development as a trading hub. 

The Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and the subsequent Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), saw poster production reach a climax, in which the medium reached its peak in terms of artistic expression in form and content. There was unchecked production of woodcut print posters, all recording the minutiae of political life, no matter how insignificant, with their immediacy and newsworthiness becoming part of their charm. Viewed from the perspective of contemporary art, the Cultural Revolution could be interpreted as a heritage street-art exhibition on an unparalleled scale. 

Black Ecstatic

July 24, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: The vibrant setting for Get Up, Stand Up Now

There are so many works that, politically and culturally, hit you right between the eyes at Get Up, Stand Up Now, an exhibition celebrating how black art pioneers have shaped the UK over the last 50 years. They connect in so many different ways and means that it’s hard to prioritise any of them. For sheer immediacy and unforgettable impact, however, Richard Rawlins’ black-power fist rising from a gilt-edged Victorian cup of tea in The True Crown (2018) dishes out some beating. It’s a powerful statement that explicitly invokes conflict between the airs, graces, niceties and sweetness of traditional English afternoon tea versus the plight of the black slaves working on the sugar plantations. It’s stark, brutal, incontrovertible black-and-white truth. A 1970s fashion shoot by Armet Francis in Brixton Market, in which a model sits glamorously bedecked in a flowing lilac suit and headpiece with her heeled red-shoed foot atop a white line in the road, is forceful but softer – like an exclamation mark to the beauty of the black aesthetic. 

These contrasts abound at London’s Somerset House West Wing galleries. Beginning with the Windrush generation and extending to today’s brilliant young black talent from around the world, a group of 110 interdisciplinary artists are showcasing their work together for the first time. They explore black experience and influence, from the post-war era to the present day, and how its makers have merged the personal and political to highlight the issues of their time. 

In this multisensory gathering (on until September 15), historic works and new commissions sit alongside items from personal archives. Curator and visual artist Zak Ové has invited each artist to exhibit as a true groundbreaker of their generation and their genre.

The talent includes photographer Rhea Storr, who explores mixed-race identity growing up in Yorkshire; Scottish band Young Fathers; designer Martine Rose, one of the UK’s most underrated fashion forces (and a judge at the Hong Kong Young Fashion Designers’ Contest last September as part of Centrestage); Grace Wales Bonner, the 28-year-old Central Saint Martins graduate whose fashion collections have been inspired by the likes of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, jazz esoteric Alice Coltrane and early 20th-century Harlem, and who recently staged her first exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, titled A Time for New Dreams in homage to an essay collection by Nigerian poet Ben Okri; and short film and music video director Jenn Nkiru, who worked on Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “Apeshit” video as a second-unit director, and who premiered her short film Black to Techno (on Detroit techno music) at Frieze Los Angeles in February.

There’s also Turner Prize-winning artists Steve McQueen and Lubaina Himid; the Scottish-born, Trinidad-based painter Peter Doig; and artist Yinka Shonibare, whose Revolution Kid (Calf) – a fibreglass human mannequin dressed in vibrantly coloured African fabrics but with the head of a cow, and holding golden guns and smartphones – draws attention to the postcolonial relationship between Africa and Europe and the economic disparity between the two, while also appealing to youth via the tools of emancipation, violence and globalisation. It still looks as striking and poignant today as when it first showed at Art Basel in 2012. 

The exhibition has been designed by London-based, Nigerian-born Yinka Ilori, who references the vibrant, dynamic colours and patterns of his African roots. The gallery rooms are separated into five themes: Motherland, Masquerade, Dream to Change the World, Imaginary Landscapes and Mothership. There’s also a “temple to learning” conceived by Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk, which contains the ambitious Afrofuturist mural Shrine to Wisdom. A selection of titles on black history and culture are also available for visitors to indulge. 

But it all begins with the curator’s father, Horace Ové, who is widely known for creating the first feature film by a black British director, Pressure (which was ultimately released in 1976 after being shelved for a few years) – about a black British teenager and the racism he experiences. Zak Ové hopes the show will set the stage for a reassessment of his father’s legacy. “I’m really excited that the public will be able to see my father’s work again, or perhaps discover it,” he says. “He was such a pioneer of his time.”

Know Your Manga

June 26, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

So what is manga, exactly? 

Manga is a Japanese comic book or graphic novel with a twist, serialised in newspapers and magazines. Originating in Japan, it now has fans across the globe and is immersive storytelling through pictures, where the images rule supreme. The Japanese characters for “manga” translate as “pictures run riot” or “pictures unbounded”, and there is less reliance on text; the narrative is created through expressive line-drawing, along with the visual development of individual characters. It is this visually immersive quality that makes it so popular.

How did it develop? 

Manga’s roots are international and can be traced back as far as 1200 CE, but the form as we know it today first emerged from serialised cartoon strips in various magazines and newspapers in the 1920s. Its popularity developed throughout the 20th century and it now boasts a global reach. The phenomenon is still expanding and includes animation (known as “anime” in Japan), art, fashion, graffiti, digital multimedia and gaming.

How big is manga? 

It’s a multi-billion-pound industry, fuelled by its readers and viewers. It’s immensely popular with people of every age in Japan and increasingly across the world. With hundreds of genres, from sports to love, and from horror to sexual identity, there is a manga for everyone. 

A particularly popular example is One Piece, by Oda Eiichiro, which tells the adventures of a boy whose body has become rubberised after eating “gum-gum fruit” and who travels the world on a pirate ship in search of a priceless treasure: the legendary One Piece. Created for the publisher Shueisha in 1997, it’s still going strong and has filled 91 individual volumes. One Piece has more than 440 million books in circulation worldwide, making it the best-selling manga of all time and earning it a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Tell us more about the business and production sides… 

Many large publishers in Japan derive a significant portion of their profits from manga. It’s very big business – the turnover of the domestic manga industry in 2016 was approximately £3 billion. Four of the top publishers who control a large share of the market are Kodansha, Hakusensha, Shogakukan and Shueisha. They’re constantly competing and trying to retain popular artists. Editors are assigned by the publishing houses to specific artists and play a key role in developing stories in collaboration with them. They often help with content, managing the production schedules, overall formatting and conducting basic research for the artist on the theme or images depicted. 

What’s the best way to read manga? 

Manga is produced in many different formats, now including those made for mobile devices, which lets you adapt how you wish to read it. Traditionally, the books are read from back to front and from the upper-right corner to the lower-left corner of a page. Formats include the simple four-panel manga (yonkoma), mostly seen in newspapers or on mobile phones; magazine compendiums of serialised artists (the weekly shūkanshi and monthly gekkanshi); and individual books of specific manga or authors (tankōbon). There are also fanzines and independently published fan-created comics (dōjinshi).

The brilliant artist Kōno Fumiyo recently published the book Giga Town: Album of Manga Symbols in order to help us understand the grammar and symbols embedded within the medium. Drawing animals based on the 12th-century handscroll Chōjū-giga, Kōno makes the manga symbols, called manpu, come alive. Here we see her heroine, a young white rabbit named Mimi-chan, racing a turtle that could be straight out of Aesop’s Fables. They also help explain the meaning of the use of spirals in manga – namely to show something spinning, either in movement or in one’s head through dizziness.

About anime, what’s the relationship? 

Originally printed in newspapers, then in magazines and single-volume books, manga is now going digital and is available in many different formats – and almost all languages. If popular, a manga may become the basis for an anime series or film. 

Golden Kamuy is a relatively new manga that has published more than nine million copies and is now a popular anime translated into English. Written by Noda Satoru, it’s a dramatic action tale that takes place in the early 1900s on the northern island of Hokkaido. The hero, Sugimoto, teams up with a local Ainu girl named Asirpa to attempt to find gold stolen from the indigenous Ainu community in a deadly race with the Imperial Japanese 7th Division Army and other assorted (and often unsavoury) characters.

Noda, a Hokkaido native, told me how he researched all aspects of the manga, including eating the food portrayed. Both the manga and the anime are gripping, as well as beautiful and educational – you learn about Hokkaido and Ainu customs as you become absorbed in the story.

And in Japan, some manga is designed along gender lines? 

Different strands have evolved for male and female audiences. Shōnen, aimed at young men, tends to focus on action and adventure, while shōjo is aimed at young women and focuses on romance and relationships. However, there is increasing crossover in the plotlines, the subject matter and the gender of protagonists. Shōjo can also include stories of male homosexual relationships, known as “boys’ love” or BL (yaoi).

Higashimura Akiko is a brilliant young shōjo artist. Heavily influenced by shōjo from the 1980s, she is known for titles aimed at young women. They include the award-winning Princess Jellyfish, which was published as a series by Kodansha as a result of demand from fans and has been turned into an anime that is currently being translated into English. 

Hot Shot

June 12, 2019 / by Zhang Yen

In 1965, the same year that Andy Warhol was producing endless iterations of his photographic silkscreen series such as his Campbell’s soup cans, a French farmer walked across a field in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, and discovered a rusted Belgian-manufactured Lefaucheux revolver. Of note was that it had purportedly been last used by 37-year-old post-impressionist and highly tormented Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, who shot himself in the stomach on July 29, 1890. 

Described as “the most famous weapon in art history”, the gun is expected to sell well beyond its US$45,000–US$56,000 estimate when it goes to auction on June 19, courtesy of AuctionArt Rémy Le Fur & Associés at Drouot in Paris. The 7mm revolver, reportedly kept by the family that owned the Auberge Ravoux inn where the artist stayed in the final months of his life, is now being sold by the descendants of the original owners. 

The appetite for Van Gogh has never been greater than now. This year alone, the artist is the subject of an exhibition at Tate Britain until August; FTLife Tower in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Bay is also showing a multisensory exhibition of the artist’s work and there are another nine shows happening around the world. 

The smoking gun in the artist’s narrative is that while the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam insists he took his own life, speculation has mounted in recent years that his shooting was by accident rather than by design – and that the gun went off during a struggle between the artist and some other locals. (It certainly wouldn’t be out of character; Van Gogh’s friendship with Paul Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor, when in a rage he famously severed part of his own left ear). After being shot or having shot himself in the stomach, it was another 30 apparently painful hours before Dr Paul Gachet pronounced the artist dead.