Cultural bonds
Museums explore innovative ways to reach the public
Something quirky was happening in the usually rarefied, straightlaced confines of Prince Kung’s Mansion in Beijing. A show whose star turned to be a red fox dressed in the blue and white long suit of a prince was being held in the mansion, and hundreds of people, mostly young, had flocked to see it.
More other red foxes, with round hats, held in their hands a rendering of the Chinese character fu, meaning lucky, inspired by Emperor Kangxi’s representation of fu as a birthday gift to his grandmother in 1673. It is part of the collection of Prince Kung’s Palace Museum, as the mansion is officially known, and reproductions of it are the most popular products the museum’s store sells.
In July the museum welcomed to its promotional team a cartoon image that will help it develop its merchandise. The designer of the red fox, called Ali, was the company Dream Castle Culture of Beijing, which in conjunction with the museum has produced other merchandise such as chopsticks, dolls, fans, key rings and lanterns.
“We hope to attract young people and develop more interesting products in a market for museum merchandise that is booming,” says Chen Xiaowen, deputy director of Prince Kung’s Palace Museum.
The museum shop sells more than 100,000 scrolls a year inscribed with the character fu, and it took in a total of 70 million yuan ($10.5 million) last year, Chen says, most of their buyers being middle-aged tourists.
However, the museum’s ambitions extend far beyond hawking good-luck symbols to the masses, and this year it set up a department whose task is to look at how it can draw on its huge collections to develop more products, especially those young people, and thus set the museums cash registers ringing.
In so doing, Prince Kung’s Palace Museum is a kindred spirit with thousands of other museums throughout the country that over the past few years have begun to cast aside the image of stuffy institutions out of touch with the public to be replaced by switched on business operations that know how to turn a dollar.
In July, Suzhou Museum in Jiangsu province and fashionable clothes brands on T-mall, China’s largest e-commerce platform, put their heads together to use elements from the museum’s ink paintings and calligraphy in designs for T-shirts and dresses. Not only that, but for a brief time the museum became the venue for a fashion show, perhaps a first in China.
Elements of works by the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) scholar and calligrapher Tang Bohu and even of the museum’ s architecture designed by I.M. Pei have even found their way onto chic articles of clothing, and in just one three-day period the platform attracted about 60,000 buyers.
Jiang Han, who is responsible for product development for Suzhou Museum, says its fashion initiative has set the standard for other museums across the country that need to get in touch with people and reshape the attitudes of young people regarding museums.
Chen Ruijin, director of Suzhou Museum, says: “Online shopping platforms are perfect for helping sales of museum products grow. We ought to use the era of the internet to spread our traditional culture in new ways.”
Just as the Suzhou Museum has set itself up as an exemplar of innovation for other cultural institutions, the country’s top museums, the China National Museum and the Palace Museum (also known as the Forbidden City), both in Beijing, are showing the way on e-commerce, having set up separate operations on the online trader T-mall.com.
The two museums have sold thousands of artistic items, many inspired by items in their collections, in thousands of categories, priced from 20 yuan to more than 10,000 yuan.
China National Museum announced in March that it would work with the e-commerce giant Alibaba Group on a project called Cultural and Creative China, which aims to bring together more than 100 museums in the country to develop and sell museum merchandise. In June, the Shanghai free trade zone gave the museum approval to develop some products there. The approval covers about 400 antiques from museums that are participants in Cultural and Creative China.
Online shopping platforms are perfect for helping sales of museum products grow. We ought to use the era of the internet to spread our traditional culture in new ways.”
Chen Ruijin, director of Suzhou Museum
“The project is akin to an aircraft carrier for museums,” says Hu Huanzhong, general manager of Shanghai Free Trade Zone International Culture Investment and Development Company. “China National Museum alone has 1.3 million collections. Now many foreign design companies are looking to work with us.”
The free trade zone is being used to link design companies, designers and overseas markets with museums.
Hu says the market of the future consists largely of those born after the 1990s, which explains why the designs on many museum products have a decidedly offbeat edge, veering to the style of Japanese animé, such as items with prints of emperors in scissor-hand poses or with chubby imperial bodyguards.
“We are also keen for our museum products to attract people overseas,” Hu says.
In China there are about 4,500 museums, and last year more and more of them jumped on the bandwagon to develop museum products, with the enthusiastic encouragement of the central government as it promotes free-market ideals.
Freedom to innovate
In March, regulatory shackles that had kept state-owned museums from engaging in commercial activities were removed, and they are now encouraged to work with the tourism and cultural and design industries to make and sell artistic items. A plethora of State Council and Ministry of Culture regulations have been promulgated this year to give support to this push, and cultural institutions have been swift in taking advantage of them.
In June a series of animations exquisitely painted in a traditional style made a big splash on social network platforms. What is so eyecatching about them is that they depict emperors’ concubines who are switched onto the 21st century. In one short animation, a concubine wears a virtual reality headset to chat with the emperor, in another she chats with friends through social networking, and in another she idly plays games on a smartphone. The animation series with a punch had the full blessing of the Palace Museum in Beijing, and private business was brought into the act, too, the internet giant Tencent putting out a call for young people to design e mot icons and games based on the Palace Museum’s treasures.
Before this collaboration with Tencent the museum had built up a reputation for itself in developing funny and attractive museum products and apps based on its collection.
The designer Fang Yimin, who has designed jewelry for the Palace Museum, says it is not as though the young do not appreciate traditional culture and museums. However, the institutions need to intrigue them in a way that will be readily acceptable to them, she says. The Palace Museum sets an example in appealing to the young in terms of both products and promotions, Fang says.
Promoting love for culture
For Su Yi, deputy director of the information department of the museum, its efforts to promote the design of games and emoji transcend financial considerations; the museum is keen to promote a love of traditional culture among the young, she says.
The museum developed more than 8,000 products involving clothes, bags, porcelain, paintings, accessories and jewelry. Revenue from its products sold online and in stores exceeded 1 billion yuan ($150 million) last year.
The museum put a mobile phone holder on sale last year, and within an hour of it going on the market about 1,500 had been sold. Apart from merchandise, the museum is also becoming involved in producing films, animations and literature.
Ye Chen, 28, who works for a bank in Shanghai, and who is a selfavowed aficionado of cultural merchandise, says that anything she has bought from the Palace Museum’s online shop is creative and attractive. Many of her friends and colleagues follow her to buy them after seeing her purchases.
”I don’t like tourist products that simply have a picture from a museum’s collection on them or that are poorly done reproductions. I want something that doesn’t just appeal to the eye but is useful, too.”
What she has bought from national-level museums has been reasonably priced, but the merchandise many other museums sell is overpriced, she says.
Yu Renguo, founder of Dream Castle Culture Company of Beijing, which designed the red fox Ali for Prince Kung’s Palace Museum, says: “China is becoming a lucrative market for cultural and creative products. Many foreign companies are also interested in it.”
This year he was invited to give a speech on the subject in Las Vegas and Seou, he says.
When he set up his company seven years ago it was difficult to sell cultural and creative products, but with the growing middle class and the young generation, the demand for high-quality museum products has soared, he says.
His collaboration with Prince Kung’s Palace Museum in creating Ali was a first for his company, he says, and he is confident work with other museums is in the pipeline.
”Yes, people are excited about the industry, but we still need to make a greater effort in developing products, ones that cover a wide range of areas and that are truly unique. We should not limit ourselves to fridge magnets, scarves, bookmarks and cups.”