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Many of China's major museums have begun constructing digital
clones of themselves in the form of websites and producing
twin-language exhibition catalogues as the country evolves into a
global high-tech and cultural power.
But in etching out their images in cyberspace as part of China's
"digital museum project," some art centers have drawn only
minimalist sketches, while others have painted "cyber still lifes"
that might attract but not interact with a world-spanning web of
art fans.
With its drive to become the country's first world art centre
with a digitally based collection, Beijing's Millennium Art Museum
might be expected to produce China's best culture-centered
website.
The museum states on its site at http://www.bj2000.org.cn/sjthome/index.shtml
that it was created "to welcome the new century and new
millennium."
Comparing itself with the Temple of Heaven, used by the ancients
to sacrifice to Heaven, the Millennium suggests it is instead an
altar to art and to the future.
Museum director Wang Limei says: "In addition to conventional
exhibition techniques, the [Millennium] World Art Museum
will develop an array of new media displays in order to best show
and explain art objects digital construction will be at the core of
the museum's construction."
She adds the museum will create a kaleidoscope of works from
civilizations past and present, and will be guided by a curators
"committee that will include experts from all over the world."
The Millennium last year unveiled a Web-wired digital art centre
and exhibition halls that could in theory be used to import entire
new-media collections or transmit the latest Chinese artworks via
the Internet to laptops or art outposts across the planet all at
the speed of an electron.
The museum aims to become a meeting place for arts across the
ages and cultures across the continents and to promote "respect and
understanding of others, thus facilitating smooth communication in
an international exchange of ideas," says Wang Limei.
"This will be the first world art museum in China, and also the
first window through which the art of the world could be
displayed."
The director might also have added that the museum's website is
a cyber-window that could allow millions of art aficionados
worldwide to skim its collection and interact with curators; each
site here is likewise a looking glass into the spirit of Chinese
civilization that might be scanned by youths from Beijing to
Brussels to Boston.
And with the exploding numbers of Chinese going online the
figure has already passed the 100-million mark and is still
rocketing upward some have become so enmeshed in the matrix of the
Web that it almost seems to younger netizens that places, people
and cultures are virtually unreal unless they exist in virtual
reality.
Yet the Millennium's current website is unlikely to net these
tech-savvy youths, whose attention span can be measured in several
mouse-clicks. The museum's Chinese-language site carries few
channels for feedback or interaction with curators and artists.
'Black holes'
These "black holes" in the Millennium's cyberspace presence are
curious because it has produced a series of great bilingual
catalogues over the past two years including the yet-to-be-released
2006 booklet titled World Art Museum and worked with a New York
design institute to create a special website at http://www.newmediabeijing.org/
on a new-frontier digital arts show the museum staged last
spring.
Like many other Chinese art centers, the Millennium Art Museum
might have most of the pieces in place to produce a
state-of-the-art cyber-double, but so far has failed to connect the
digital dots.
Zhu Jun, chief technical supervisor at the Millennium, suggests
that museums across China lack not only funding, but also an
adequate pool of "digital designers" who are able to create the
synergy between art and technology that shines across the best
websites worldwide.
Ken Fields, who teaches digital media courses at Peking
University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, says the digital
talent shortage is a legacy of China's Soviet-style, centrally
planned education system. Under that system, which is now being
phased out, "there was no blending of arts and science, so art
students didn't have exposure to technology, and science students
were walled off from art," he says.
But since the turn of the century, leading schools, including
Tsinghua University and the Central Conservatory of Music, have all
begun introducing new media courses that could rapidly expand the
ranks of China's cyber-painters and Web-artisans.
Wang Yudong, the forward-looking vice-director of the
Millennium, says "we are now going into overdrive to build a better
virtual version of the Millennium Art Museum."
Great opportunity in 2008
He adds that some leaders in the city government "realize that
the period between now and the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing
represents a great opportunity for Chinese cultural centers to
become more open and interactive, from the local to the global
levels."
Wang says the countdown to the Olympics will see more museums
and artists in the Chinese capital racing to perfect their digital
profiles and performance.
Feng Yuan, former director of the National Art Museum of China,
explains that a growing number of museum curators are beginning to
realize the importance of improving their cyber-image before the
world's athletes, spectators and television cameras throw a
city-wide spotlight on Beijing two and a half years from now.
Feng adds the "National Art Museum has begun issuing a series of
bilingual catalogues for every major exhibit it holds."
Feng himself presided over the publishing of a beautifully
written and illustrated 225-page book entitled Tresors
impressionnistes des collections nationales francaises,
printed in French and Chinese, to accompany the exhibition of
French Impressionist masterworks at the Beijing museum.
The museum also printed a free, 12-page leaflet in English and
Chinese for the French show, but strangely, the near-perfect
translations never appeared on the art center’s website at http://www.namoc.org/.
In sharp cyber-contrast, the Musee d'Orsay, which sent the
Impressionist collection to China as part of a massive, two-year
arts exchange programme between the two cultural giants, operates a
tri-lingual (French, English and Spanish but not Chinese) website
at http://www.musee-orsay.fr/ORSAY/orsaygb/HTML.NSF/.
The Parisian museum's site features a borderless blending of art
and digital design, along with myriad means to electronically
engage visitors and curators in an interactive exchange.
Wang Chun, a young researcher at the National Art Museum, says:
"We are now developing a Chinese-English website, and hope to
unveil it soon."
She explains that the museum wants to gradually weave its
digital reflection into the World Wide Web and expand its global
reach.
Hong Kong-based artist and designer Alan Chan says that the
first rays of a digitally-inspired renaissance could be appearing
on China's virtual horizon.
"With exploding exposure to satellite television and the
Internet," he says, "Chinese youths are becoming much more
creative." He adds that a new generation of young Chinese "digital
Da Vincis" is already emerging.
A new dawning of digital innovation is beginning to light
China's culture-scape. While virtual museums like Xi'an's
Terracotta Warrior outpost experiment with selling art online, more
commercial websites including Chan's (http://www.alanchandesign.com)
and Beijing's Tongli Studio (http://www.tonglistudio.com)
designed by a group called Virtual Ikon Factory now feature cool
cyber-galleries that provide an interactive forum for artists.
And when digital artist and architect Huang Jun was hand-picked
by the curators of the now-running Shenzhen Biennale on
Architecture and Urbanism to design a website, he created a
new-century cyber-city (http://www.shenzhenbiennale.cn)
that is both a high-tech channel to and a fantastic projection of
the exhibition.
A former curator at the Millennium Art Museum, Chao Chen, says:
"The design for the Shenzhen architecture biennale website is
brilliant."
With its meshing of culture and technology, and of the real and
virtual worlds, she adds, "this website is itself a work of
art."
(China Daily February 13, 2006)
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