First-time visitors to the Millennium Art Museum's new underground art center might be startled as the framed "still-lifes" around them start magically moving -- as if in Harry Potter books -- speaking, or even changing places with other artworks meters or museums away.
These "moving pictures" are not an illusion, but the latest leap by one of China's top museums to embrace the digital age and arts. They are also part of the Millennium Art Museum (MAM)'s wide-ranging plan "to make art more accessible to the public, more interactive, and more universal in appeal," says Chaos Chen, one of the dynamic young innovators behind MAM's transformation into a global art space.
Exciting shows
Part of the Millennium's new art center, the digital gallery, resembles the Web-wired art tableaux scattered through the hyper-high-tech home of Microsoft founder Bill Gates: Giant plasma screens might display impressionist paintings that morph into surrealist sculptures or futuristic films in an endlessly changing digital montage.
The museum has also added a state-of-the-art video theatre and four smaller exhibition halls -- all connected to the World Wide Web -- to make the e-arts center the most advanced in China.
The digital gallery's 20 computer-controlled screens, which form a vast ring around the core of the circular art center, were unveiled on January 1 featuring a collection of modern artworks from the Parisian Orsay Museum.
"Artworks on each screen are rotated every one to 10 minutes," so museum-goers can view up to 1,200 works per hour across the framed displays, says MAM vice-director Wang Yudong.
In the future, the digital display space will showcase everything from "paintings to new media artworks from all over the world," he adds.
Wang says the French show will be followed by a Portuguese exhibition that similarly circumvents the need to transport a traditional collection by displaying each work's digitally cloned twin.
The Millennium's exhibits will increasingly focus on works in new media, which cover the spectrum of "digital videos, Internet art/tech, digital photography, and other forms of digital imagery, including animations and virtual reality," adds Wang, who is another prime force behind the museum's race towards the future.
The museum began etching out a place for itself on the international art map with a 2002 exhibition titled "Salvador Dali -- A Journey Into Fantasy," which was staged with the Danish United Exhibits Group.
Danish Ambassador Ole Lonsmann Poulsen called the surrealist show "a true European exhibition" embedded with "the newest interactive technologies developed in Denmark." The ambassador said the event was not only a showcase on Dali's life and art, but also "a journey into new ways of making museum exhibitions on art and culture."
The first exhibition of Dali's dream-inspired artworks in China, with a multi-media set-up that encouraged fans to experiment with their own surrealist creations, drew countless youths who have grown up with satellite television, Sony play-stations and Web cafes, and who might shy away from more conventional museum events.
Curator Chaos Chen says that as well as attracting spectators from every circle of China's increasingly diverse society, the museum aims "to keep the Chinese audience aware of the most extraordinary developments in art worldwide -- the greatest achievements of humanity."
World trend
Chen, who frequently shuttles between Beijing, Paris, Berlin and New York to keep up with the times and trends in art, says that during the close of the last century, "The Museum of Modern Art" in New York organized the best-ever symposium on how to make art more interactive and accessible, and that started a whole new discourse on modern art museums.
New York City's MoMA has since started using the Web to reach out to the old and the young, the city and the world. MoMA's website (www.moma.org/), for example, now uses a green alien in a Flash animation to attract youngsters.
This cartoon extraterrestrial encourages kids not only to view paintings like Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night," but also to write poetry on the stars or run their cursors along Umberto Boccioni's "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space" as the sculpture emits music ranging from techno to Chill Out to neo-classical.
Chen says that in the age of the Internet, "perhaps hundreds or thousands of people explore a museum's website for every one person who visits the museum itself," and adds she has been prodding the Millennium to quickly improve its presence in cyberspace.
The Millennium Art Museum currently hosts only rudimentary sites (www.mam.gov.cn in Chinese and www.bj2000.org.cn in English) that do not even have cross links or info on upcoming exhibitions.
The Web-savvy Chen adds that her personal favorite museum website, operated by the Netherlands Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (www.wdw.nl), "is extremely interactive and shows how successful a virtual museum could become."
Synchronized with its top exhibits, the Rotterdam museum operates public and online dialogues that invite the world to take part. Throughout 2004, the Witte de With brought together a group of Western and Islamic scholars and artists to hold a running on-site and online discourse on the causes of and potential solutions to terrorism and war in the Middle East.
Curator Chen says "the entire Witte de With museum has been digitalized and entered the virtual world."
Long way ahead
Zhu Jun, chief technical supervisor at the Millennium Art Museum, says: "Many of China's leading museums have started creating digital versions of their collections or designing websites as part of China's 'digital museum project.'" Zhu says the project has three aims: creating a digital library of each museum's collection, using digital technology to help preserve or restore artworks, and posting some collections on the Web.
But art industry insiders say that government funding has been tight for the digital museum project, which in turn has slowed down the building of websites or digitalized collections.
"We are just starting to lay the bottom bricks in the pyramid of technology needed to create digital museums," says Zhu.
Wang Yudong agrees, and adds: "China has just launched its exploration of and experimentation with new media." He also says the Millennium wants to step up "co-operation with the world's emerging scholars and artists" in the area.
He says, for example, that the museum is now holding talks with an American arts foundation to use its digital museum technology as part of larger steps "to import digital artworks and export digital versions of Chinese works via the Internet."
The museum is also working with two of China's top colleges, Tsinghua University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, along with the Boston-based MIT and the Dutch V2 Institute For Unstable Media (based in Rotterdam and partner in the Witte de With digital museum) in a May exhibition at the Millennium to focus on the neo-century's convergence of art and technology in new media artworks.
Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of MIT's Media Lab, says that with parallel developments in digital technology, the Web and hi-speed globalization, artists are for the first time in history being given the chance to present their works to and interact with a potentially planet-wide audience.
Negroponte says in his book "Being Digital" that "We have the opportunity to distribute and experience rich sensory signals that are different from looking at the page of a book and more accessible than traveling to the Louvre.
"Artists will come to see the Internet as the world's largest gallery for their expressions."
The Internet is also allowing digital art museums like the Millennium to communicate with and display the works of techno-artists located anywhere in the Web-connected world.
The May media exhibition at the Millennium, titled "In The Line of Flight," will cover artworks "selected by a (global) group of distinguished curators, with representative works of telematic art, virtual reality, Net art, robotic art, interactive TV/cinema, software art, biotech art, data visualization and game art," according to an outline of the show developed with New York's Parsons School of Design and posted at www.newmediabeijing.org/.
Wang Limei, the museum's forward-looking director, says that "Art exhibitions in the Millennium Art Museum have become an important part of life in Beijing and an important window through which governments, organizations and artists from all over the world communicate with each other."
Wang says the venue's unique features, a primarily digital collection and global collaboration, will help it "emphasize art as a cultural phenomenon shared by all humanity."
Wang, writing in a catalogue titled "World Art Museum" -- a show scheduled for 2006 that will focus on the museum's own future -- adds that "our attention to world art is not a focus on the Other, but rather is an observation of ourselves as members of world culture."
(China Daily January 11, 2005)
