Last week, a three-day inaugural celebration was held on the new campus of the central academy, in northeastern Beijing's Huajiadi.

A month before that, students and teachers bid farewell to a temporary home in a factory, where the school had been based for six years after moving out of an old campus in downtown Beijing's Wangfujing in 1994.

The celebrations kicked off on October 17 when hundreds of distinguished guests and alumni from home and abroad gathered on the new campus for a grand inauguration conference. In the afternoon, Chinese Vice-Premier Li Lanqing met with a group of overseas art educators who attended the celebration.

The second day of festivities included a forum of international art school leaders. Presidents and deans from 12 of the world's most renowned art schools delivered speeches on art education and art exchanges.

On the third day, a series of lectures were given by 10 art professors from abroad, discussing subjects ranging from art design and new media art, to art pedagogy.

Works of art created by teachers and students of the school, as well as artists from abroad were displayed on campus in order to celebrate a new chapter in the school's history.

"The inauguration of the new campus is definitely a milestone in the history of CAFA and in Chinese art education. We have plenty of reasons to celebrate," said Fan Di'an, vice-president of the central academy.

Throughout the three-day celebration, Fan and the teachers, students and alumni of the school expressed their enthusiasm for the new campus, but they cautioned that even a world-class facility does not mean everything.

The reform of the art education system in an era of information and economic globalization seems more urgent, according to Jin Shangyi, former president of CAFA who initiated the forum of international art school leaders.

"Like in the rest of the world, Chinese higher art education is facing new challenges as the future of art becomes more and more uncontrollable and the boundary of art more blurred," Jin told the opening of the forum.

"The central academy used to focus mainly on pure art. In the future we should pay more attention to art design to meet the demands of modern society," Pan Gongkai, president of the school, said at the forum.

After opening a design department, the central academy is planning to establish a design school in the near future which will train both art designers and design administrators.

"Of course, it is important to put the aesthetics of pure art into the education and practice of design. That should be an advantage of the central academy," Pan said.

Many speakers at the forum pointed out that art students should be exposed to more knowledge in other disciplines of culture, rather than simply focusing on learning artistic skills as emphasized in the traditional style of art education.

Skills in oral and written communication, for instance, are especially necessary for future art school graduates, according to Paul Jolly, dean of the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Australia.

Criticizing the growing uniformed educational mode of art schools in both China and abroad, Timothy Emlyn Jones, deputy director of the Glasgow School of Art in Britain, pointed out that globalization should not be realized at the cost of losing the world's many cultures.

"The world needs now, more than any other time, an acceptance and a sharing of our differences. To share our creativity must be to everyone's benefit," he said.

"Against the background of globalization, it's necessary to stress humanistic concern and to develop an art education system with Chinese characteristics," said Pan. "We need to dig further into Chinese traditions and Western modern art at the same time."

It can be expected that a new round of reform in art education will push Chinese art schools like the Central Academy of Fine Arts to a new high in the 21st century.

(China Daily October 25, 2001)