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)