For the last month or so I’ve had a solo show of my paintings up in Hong Kong. Titled Laughing with a Mouth Full of Blood, it was held at the beautifully restored Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, in the bustling district of Sheung Wan, in the centre of the city. Hidden amongst the modern skyscrapers, this 100 year old red brick building is quite at odds with urban landscape.

My management organization Future Industries converted the historical museum into a contemporary art space, constructing a temporary ‘white cube’ gallery inside this unique building (once used as a bacteriological institute and a pathology lab).

After my recent multimedia installation projects, the exhibition was a return to oils and canvas and a continuation of my exploration of the human body in figurative paintings. Tilting into abstraction, mapping the complex intertwining of pain and pleasure aversion and desire, decay and growth. I’ve always been interested in a central investigation of duality, as hinted in the exhibition title, how everything beautiful is tragic as time drags us all in one direction.

This realisation liberates us as we are more conscious of the finite nature of existence, how little time we have to make the most of it. The work, obsessively and intimately exploring flesh and form, partners perfectly with this former scientific institution where flesh would have been explored in a very different way historically.

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Daydreaming With… is a new, indefinable, edgy, creative organisation in the UK that spawns all kinds of collaborations and events.

Created by James Lavelle, of MoWax and UNKLE fame, it puts on exhibitions in unusual spaces with artists, filmmakers, musicians, all of whom are connected to Lavelle in some way (such as 3D from Massive Attack, who painted the cover for the UNKLE album, War Stories, or Jonathan Glazer, who Lavelle worked with on the feature film Sexy Beast). I was in their show at Haunch of Venison last September. It was just excellent, so unexpected.

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He knew what the fuck he was talking about. This video is from a 1964 BBC Horizon programme. Incredible.

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Great British artist — I love his paintings — and this is a great little insight into how he works. Whenever I read interviews with artists, it’s always their working process I find most interesting. Cooke’s multilayered approach is not dissimilar to my own, though clearly his work is very different.

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My favourite at the moment, from New Zealand, which also gave Lord of the Rings its set. That was the best thing about the film, which as far as I can make out, was about some midgets trying to offload a ring. Apparently it took them ages: three movies to be precise. And they had a really powerful wizard that could’ve done the job in about five minutes. But he didn’t. What a dick.

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You ever have one of those moments where you tell your mates how you’ve discovered the best new tune ever and they tell you they’ve been listening to that for years? That would be me and Fink, who I completely missed even though they’ve been around since 2006.

I will of course now be telling people i’ve been into them for ages and I like their old stuff better than their new stuff, how they were good but now they’re popular they’re shit. On Ninja Tunes from UK, the new album is called Perfect Darkness.

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Intelligent interviews with people you actually are interested to know more from. Well, apart from Ewan McGregor who will never be forgiven for his shitty English accent in the Star Wars films or that he then went on to have a laugh driving around the world on a bike with his mates and turned it into a TV show which he got paid for too. Cock.

That’s the thing about celebrity, you can do whatever the fuck you like and some twat will pay to watch you do it. Other than that, The Talks is a good read. Until they do one with Bono of course. Then it’ll be shit.

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