A shot rings out in the yellow wheatfields trailing a group of crows in the sky, with winds blowing and the smell of straw floating in the air. Then you hear the voice of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, who has just shot himself in the chest, revealing how desperate he feels.
This is the opening of a show on the life of the Dutch genius of colors, using hi-tech effects to give visitors a glimpse of Van Gogh's world.
The interactive show, Meet Vincent Van Gogh, produced by the Van Gogh Museum had its world debut in Beijing on Saturday. After Beijing, it will tour about 30 destinations in China, including Macao and Shanghai, over five years and then travel across the world.
"We do it from the heart and from the head. We do lots of research on Van Gogh and know him well. We want to share it with as many people as possible," says Axel Ruger, director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
"It's designed for places where there are no works of Van Gogh. People don't have to travel to Amsterdam to know the great artist."
The U-shaped exhibition hall, about 8 meters high, reveals the artist's life through various stages－his early life; Van Gogh 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 the artist's legacy and relevance after his death in 1890.
Apart from showing high-resolution images of Van Gogh's works from the museum's collection, it also presents quotations from Van Gogh's letters, displays lifelike 3-D reproductions of original works and re-creations of some of the spaces the artist used－his bedroom in Arles, which is featured in his world-famous painting The Bedroom; the cafe in Paris that he often visited to meet his artist friends; and his work studio.
Visitors can also sit on the bed in the artist's bedroom, appreciate Van Gogh's self-portraits by sitting on a pile of wheat straw and feel the genius' brush strokes by touching a several-meter-high sculpture that is an amplified copy of the peasant in his painting The Harvest.
They can also use their fingers to paint on a screen with the colors and swirling strokes Van Gogh employed in his works like Starry Night and Sunflowers.
Explaining why they developed the show, Rene van Blerk, senior curator of education with the Van Gogh Museum, says: "We don't have enough space in our museum for so many interactive activities to enhance the stories of the artist's life."
Blerk says the show uses as many technologies as possible to show details of stories behind Van Gogh's works.
