The world renowned Van Gogh Museum and the co-founding partner Artcomm present the travelling Meet Vincent van Gogh Experience. Currently on view in Beijing, where the Experience saw its global launch on June 15th 2016, Meet Vincent van Gogh will be toured to various cities across Greater China, including Macau and Shanghai, over the next five years by the sole Chinese licensee and local promoter Wai Chun Culture.
Meet Vincent van Gogh is the first and only official Van Gogh experience created by the experts at the Van Gogh Museum. Because of the vulnerable nature of the museum collection, many paintings by the famous Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) rarely leave the museum’s walls and some never even travel. In response to the continuously growing interest in Van Gogh, Meet Vincent van Gogh uses the latest technology to bring to life the great artist in an innovative way and to ensure that his work and life are accessible to as many people as possible.
“Vincent van Gogh is one of the most celebrated artists in the world and has been in the hearts and minds of the Chinese people since primary school. We are very proud to present the first Meet Vincent van Gogh Experience to families across China and hope that this high-quality edutainment passes on the inspiring story of Van Gogh to current and future generations,” says Axel Rüger, Director of the Van Gogh Museum.
Though millions are familiar with Van Gogh, the Meet Vincent van Gogh Experience refutes misconceptions and reveals the little-known complexities about the artist’s personality and artistic practice. Guided by quotations from over 800 personal letters, family photographs, lifelike Relievo reproductions and spectacular audiovisual scenes from Van Gogh’s artworks, life and context in which he developed into the influential artist that he was, visitors embark on a journey through the most important moments of Van Gogh’s life, beautifully rendered to simulate the world as he saw it. Through the words of Vincent himself, his brother Theo, his sister in law Jo Bonger and other key persons, Meet Vincent van Gogh provides intimate insights into the artist’s brilliant mind and troubled psyche, while its multisensory interactive environment allows visitors to discover piece by piece the man behind the great art.
Meet Vincent van Gogh tells the story of Van Gogh’s life through six comprehensive chapters, exploring his early life, him as an emerging artist in the Netherlands, Antwerp and Paris, his time in Arles in the South of France, the period of his illness and last but not least, the artist’s astonishing legacy and relevance more than 125 years after his death. Van Gogh’s various paintings and working spaces are accurately reproduced, allowing each visitor to touch the artist’s brushstrokes, actively interact with his creative environment and even try their hand at drawing using his tools. Moreover, the visitors are allowed to literally enter Van Gogh’s paintings, smell the straw in The Harvest and sit on the artist’s bed in The Bedroom. The final chapter in the Experience creates a comprehensive view of Van Gogh’s visionary practice with an interactive wall presenting hundreds of his works from collections around the world, while vi sualizations of works by his contemporaries and followers, such as artists Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Mondriaan, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney and Francis Bacon, as well as various writers, filmmakers and designers, demonstrate the profound and widespread influence Van Gogh has had and will continue to have on cultures around the world.
Meet Vincent van Gogh was developed with the profound knowledge of the experts of the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam), the co-founding partner ArtComm (specialized in traveling presentations and exhibitions worldwide), and the artist’s great-grandnephew, Willem van Gogh. This event is jointly organized by the Van Gogh Museum and Wai Chun Culture (local promoter and sole licensee of Meet Vincent van Gogh in China). Over the next five years, Wai Chun Culture will bring two sets of the Meet Vincent van Gogh Experience to various cities in Greater China, including Macau and Shanghai. Other locations will be announced soon.
