Breaking through the single function of traditional parks in the past, art industry parks have increasingly developed into a platform for new concepts, new technologies and new practices in the field of cultural tourism in recent years, and have become a characteristic symbol and bright business card to promote the prosperity and development of the city. In December 2021, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued the Opinions on Promoting the High-quality Development of National Cultural Industry Parks, which clearly proposed to implement the digital strategy of cultural industries, comprehensively use various resources and services, guide national cultural industry parks and create parks based on their own advantages, accelerate the development of new cultural formats, transform and upgrade traditional cultural formats, and enhance the supply capacity of high-quality cultural products.
Under the background of high-quality development, how should art industry parks focusing on iterative upgrading promote the creation and promotion of innovative art products and provide high-quality cultural and artistic products for the society? How to make full use of the conditions provided by scientific and technological achievements, improve the resource integration ability of the park and the ability to serve the society, so that it can be further integrated into the city and truly related to the city, the community and the residents? Obviously, these are new topics that practitioners in the art industry and experts and scholars in related fields urgently need to seriously consider and actively face.
In the cultural identity of the city
Find innovations
▲ Xihai Art Museum located in Qingdao Xihai Art Bay Art Community
As a key cultural industry project in Shandong Province and Qingdao City, Xihai Art Bay, which has been under construction for ten years and has been opened successively since the second half of 2021, provides a new sample for China Art Industry Park with its transcendent planning and construction and new era positioning. "An international comprehensive art community", this is the original positioning of the Project by Meng Xianwei, the founder of the Xihai Art Bay Project. Different from the previous model in which the art community is spontaneously formed by artists or completely handed over to the official recognition, Xihai Art Bay is an innovative art community based on the art ecology and combining public welfare and market operation with a complete industrial chain. Art Bay includes large-scale public welfare art museums, institutional art galleries, master workshops, art studios, art creation spaces, high-end art institutions, related art institutions, artist communes, sketching piers and other sections, integrating the five core elements of art education, art creation, art exhibition, art appreciation and art experience into 55 contemporary buildings, introducing contemporary art content with international perspective, connecting the world's diverse cultures with the city with unique international residency projects, and integrating art into the city's blood and public life.
Art ecology, cultural industry, the importance of a city's development does not need to be repeated, and the establishment of a complete virtuous circle of ecosystem is not easy, in Meng Xianwei's view, the natural environment and cultural environment of each area have a local nature, the planning and construction of Xihai Art Bay fully takes into account Qingdao's open, fashionable, diversified urban elements, superior tourism resources and cultural heritage, on this basis to gather international art resources, build an art community that respects the urban context and natural ecology. "We jump out of the established thinking to plan the ecological model of the art community, including architectural form, spatial layout, resource integration, etc. The art ecology is built by relying on the functional plates in the community, children, youth, young artists and master artists can find corresponding art spaces here, art museums, resident spaces and art commercial spaces provide rich material carriers for the development of the community, and the various plates are connected to each other. All planning and operation of Art Bay is based on the development law of the art ecology. Art Bay is an art community without walls, where artists, art lovers and city residents can benefit, provide more possibilities for artist friends, provide high-quality appreciation content for people who love art, provide residents with opportunities to get close to art and more activity venues, let people re-see nature and the environment, re-experience architecture and art, rethink the city and life. ”
Fan Di'an, chairman of the China Artists Association and president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, commented: "Art Bay connects the architectural park with nature, and integrates the functions of art museums, artists' creative studios and creative workshops, thus opening up the boundaries of art creation, art appreciation and art consumption, which will be a new fashion lifestyle." ”
Do a good job of "top-level design"
In order to achieve brand effect
How to further integrate into the city, expand the function of services with innovation, and provide more forms and contents for the development of cultural tourism? At present, there are many thematic characteristic art industry parks that already have sufficient resources when planning, but Fan Di'an also pointed out that the new planning often lacks the top-level design and image landing realization, that is, the park must not only have content and services, but also have an image and logo, thus becoming a real highlight in urban construction.
Jin Tao, vice chairman of Shanghai Shendi Cultural Development Research Institute, said in his interpretation of Disney's creative strategy that how to transform resource endowments into creative content is a challenge that domestic parks will face when designing, and characteristic industrial resources will eventually be planned to core products, how to achieve IP development and incubation in these products in planning, not only to consider the external form of commodity communication, but also to pay attention to the theme concept, that is, whether the park has core value. The concept to be disseminated in the park and the deep culture of the audience are not in line with the ideas that need to be considered in the top-level design. The top-level design of the park mentioned here is embodied in ideology, that is, the core value pointed to by the product, involving the concept and the emotional cognition of the audience.
Why has Disney maintained a very strong vitality as a global brand? Jin Tao believes that there are three main pillars: one is the ip-centered composite wheel industrial chain, the second is the product research and development capabilities with fantasy engineering as the core, and the third is the standard-centered technical service management system. Among them, the cornerstone of the pillar is the value. Disney's core values include family, reunion, joy; magic, dreaminess, forgetting reality; and never finishing. In Disney's globalization process, values transcend space and time, and are deeply rooted in product design in the main business segments of film and television entertainment, media networks, consumer goods, parks and resorts.
Obviously, Disney is a model for the industrialization and capitalization of park operations, as well as a model for the industrialization and capitalization of IP operations. In contrast, China's cultural industry started late, and has not yet formed an industrial scale effect and has not formed its own brand.
Create a whole industrial chain with the park
Mode of operation
What is the relationship between art parks and cultural industries? Li Baogang, founder of Beijing Guantang Art Park, believes that high-quality art parks are precisely the foundation and driving force of the cultural industry. "It is not easy to integrate the three concepts of culture and art, industry and park, what the art park should do is to grasp the artistic creativity of this era and gather the cultural industry, we call it the 'four gatherings', from the gathering of IP, to the gathering of art consumption, to the gathering of project incubation, to the gathering of talents." In this way, the four elements of our cultural and creative industries are formed – content, creativity, brand and scene. From the content of culture to the final industry is a process, there are steps, good content, good creativity, brand leadership, the combination of scenes, scene elements are the final realization of value link, that is, consider what kind of scene to use to land the product. ”
Different from the 798, where artists spontaneously gather, and unlike the Shang8 Cultural and Creative Park where creative enterprises gather, Guantang Art Park aims to build a whole-industry chain art industrial park with the business model of resource aggregation, IP collation, resource output, and industrial integration in recent years.
▲ The exhibition hall of the "Forbidden City Shiqu Baodi Painting Digital Technology Exhibition" jointly sponsored by Beijing Guantang Culture and the Palace Museum
Positioned as the excavator, creator and disseminator of China's excellent traditional culture, Beijing Guantang Culture joined hands with the Beijing Palace Museum Cultural Service Center in 2017 to establish Beijing Forbidden City Guantang Cultural Development Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Forbidden City Guantang"), with the Forbidden City's "Shiqu Baodi" catalogue of calligraphy and painting as the core, with the Forbidden City cultural resources as the platform, to carry out a full range of IP licensing, IP derivative development, cross-border cooperation and other services, integrating oriental aesthetics into modern life, and empowering the brand with cultural IP. The Forbidden City Guan Tang also participated in a number of cultural exchange projects around the "Stone Canal Baodi". For example, in 2017, it jointly launched the "Tencent Art + Project" with Guantang Culture and Tencent Research Institute to promote the special exhibition of the Forbidden City's "Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains"; and jointly launched the "National Treasure Inheritance Plan" with the Palace Publishing House, Tencent Research Institute and other institutions. In 2019, the AR book "The Essence of Shiqu Baodi in the Collection of the Palace Museum" was jointly published. In addition, Guantang Culture has also joined hands with Rongbaozhai, Dunhuang Research Institute, China Philatelic and other institutions to create a comprehensive IP industrialization operation model.
"The key link of the cultural industry is to let the creatives and good IP play a value, use scientific and technological means to form high-quality cultural products, and then rely on the platform to let the public own cultural products in the form of micro-consumption." In this way, the art park can gather projects and talents under the strong IP drainage of such projects to form a complete ecological chain of cultural industries. Li Baogang said that Guantang Culture has realized the aggregation of excellent cultural heritage IP resources, and is currently actively creating a gathering of art consumption, and will rely on innovation-driven to build a brand-intelligent art industry park in the future.
Digitalization empowers new formats
Promote new consumption
At present, digitalization continues to empower urban upgrading, and the new formats brought by the Internet have also given the art industry more prospects for expansion. The art industry park will no longer be just a physical space with walls, but also a punch card for unlimited space online. Beijing Capital Langyuan is a well-known brand operated by the Cultural and Creative Park, and its Langyuan Station has become a Beijing Internet celebrity punch card in 2021, creating a new experiential consumption model of "content + experience + consumption" with artistic installations and public cultural activities, space transformation and other diversified forms, Langyuan Station is incubating and cultivating a series of new commercial formats such as life aesthetics, fashion design, parent-child play, art exhibitions, e-commerce live broadcasting, innovative diet, and fourth space. Through the analysis of the Internet and big data, we will cultivate new brands, build new urban cultural parks, and stimulate the market vitality of cultural consumption.
"When technology and art are deeply combined, the inevitable result is that the application scenarios and application scope will become more extensive." One of the characteristics of the future of digital art is universal, and the future of digital is that through the power of technology, everyone can become a musician, composer, director, curator, and in such a popularization, art will become more important. Liu Yanjun, CEO of Shanghai Tianjing Culture and Creative Co., Ltd., said when talking about the innovation and change brought about by the development of science and technology to help the development of art.
Recently, the first art meta-universe community in China - "Meta Other Shore" was officially tested. According to reports, in the "meta other shore", artists can not only create and publish works of art online, but also build an art exhibition hall full of personality in it, and in the future, they can also communicate and interact with the audience and fans in real time through virtual images. Compared with the traditional exhibition method, "Meta Other Shore" provides a more diversified and immersive experience. With VR equipment, art lovers can cross the time and space restrictions to enter the art world and feel the charm of art "immersively". Everyone can vividly see and hear the story behind the artifacts, and even interact with the artwork in the virtual world. In the metaverse, you can experience forms of artistic presentation that are difficult to achieve in real life or that are more expensive to achieve. Notably, "Meta" also helps artists distribute artworks into corresponding digital collections. All artworks will be given unique identities and data based on blockchain technology, and users can access each unique digital collection on the chain in the form of purchases, auctions, and blind boxes.
Some insiders pointed out that with the maturity of artificial intelligence, 5G and virtual reality technologies such as VR and AR, the art market is making great strides towards the digital age. In the future, there will be a large number of immersive art works, creative tools and display platforms, which may subvert traditional art spaces such as museums, art galleries, and even art communities, and create new art spaces and new forms of art parks with more universal value.
Why is it said that "the best art industry park is not the park itself"? It is more like an incubation base, a gathering place, a place of circulation and a place of service for the art industry. The existing examples have more or less jointly depicted the path and pattern of high-quality development of new art industrial parks through different ways, and the future can be expected.
Art Industry Parks: Urban Upgrading and Digital Future
Yu Ding
Urban upgrading is an important part of sustainable urban development. In the Recently Released Sustainability Report 2021 by the United Nations, the Transformation Vision Framework for six Sustainable Development Goals was proposed: education, gender equality, health and well-being and demographics, energy decarbonisation and sustainable industries, sustainable food, land, water and oceans, sustainable cities and communities, and a sustainable digital revolution. These visions and frameworks can be implemented in every country and help address the balanced and coordinated relationship between the Sustainable Development Goals, and in this report, the diffusion of sustainable urban infrastructure and digital services is an important element of sustainable development.
China put forward the issue of urban renewal and sustainable development in the 1990s, but only in the past 20 years to strengthen, China's urban renewal to take urban sustainable development as the goal and prospect, on this basis to explore the specific content of China's urban renewal, according to the concept of sustainable development to detect the future release of all urban projects is a very important direction of china's urban development today. Urban digitalization is an important starting point for the sustainable development of urban renewal in today's world.
In the new development stage, the trend of digital city development in the mainland mainly has the following aspects: first, increase the application of emerging technologies and expand the application of urban digital scenarios; second, the continuous improvement of urban ecology, the level of digital governance will be greatly improved; third, the micro-unit focusing on the city will help build a fine governance system at the grass-roots level; fourth, the continuous sinking of urban digitalization has formed a digital-based smart city.
At present, the development of smart cities in the mainland has entered a period of overall promotion and integration, and the development of smart cities in beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Qingdao and other places pays more attention to humanistic care and pays attention to the emotional and social harmony of cities. Therefore, the deepening of livability and the creation of innovative industry clusters in urban centers have become important development trends, and art industry parks are an important direction for creating creative industry clusters in urban centers.
Both Beijing 798 and Shenzhen China Merchants Shekou's design interconnection have become creative industry clusters in the city center and the leader of smart cities. Smart city and art industry has formed a co-creation relationship, smart city as a highly creative urban form has become a strategic choice for global urban development, smart city can stimulate scientific and technological innovation to promote industrial transformation and upgrading and economic restructuring, is conducive to improving the management level of the city.
In the smart city, the digital city promotes the development of the art industry, and the digitization of art also continuously empowers the upgrading of the city. In the internet space, people refer to 2021 as the first year of the metacosm. This is actually an upgrade of the Internet, the metacosm is a new generation of the Internet, Premier Li Keqiang called it "Internet +". The metaverse mainly includes the following core technologies, one is the technology of extended display, including VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), MR (mixed reality); the second is the digital twin, which can map the impression of the real world into the virtual world; the third is to build an economic system with blockchain. The technologies involved in the metacosm are mainly derived from 6 fields, including blockchain technology, human-computer interaction technology, video game technology, artificial intelligence technology, network and computing technology, and Internet of Things technology.
The metacosm of art is the combination of digital technology and cultural creativity, which will achieve the great development and prosperity of digital culture, and digital culture will gradually develop into the mainstream culture of the metacosm, and the construction of the virtual ecosystem of the art circle will come to a more active period, especially in the construction of infrastructure interactive interface design and immersive experience, in the context of scientific and technological development and policy support, art institutions will be more involved in the experimental construction of virtual platforms. The art industry park is no longer just a physical space with walls, but also a punch card for unlimited space online.
The metacosm empowering the art industry has become an unstoppable trend. In 2020, Shougang and the popular Qitian Group jointly built a blast furnace, named "No. 1 Blast Furnace Superbody Space", to carry out cutting-edge innovative technology attempts such as cool VR, AR and holograms, including VR museum, immersive theater, VR e-sports, intelligent sports, Olympic project experience center, special commodity area, etc., adding more fresh vitality.
▲ Aichang Artificial Intelligence Art Center's first exhibition "Book of Sand" scene
In the field of AI, there has been a field called artificial intelligence art, where artificial intelligence can color sketches, can combine the characteristics of paintings to paint new paintings, and even create works of art that can be auctioned. China's first artificial intelligence art institution, Aichang Artificial Intelligence Art Center, also quietly opened in a digital art community on the outskirts of Shanghai at the end of October 2021, this 15,000-square-meter area, after welcoming the China Aichang Artificial Intelligence Art Center, Tongji University School of Design and Creative College Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Zhang Zhoujie Digital Laboratory, Ma Liang Studio and other institutions have successively settled in. It will become an emerging art industrial park that combines the new form of on-site entity of the new art industry park with the artificial intelligence world of the virtual world.
The above emerging cases make us see that art can make smart cities smarter, and the development of the art industry will launch emerging art content and products, which will inevitably bring people a new experience and enjoyment, so that people's information content selection and consumption process are more humane, personalized and differentiated, thereby further improving people's creativity and providing new solutions for smart cities.
(The author is Dean of the School of Art Management and Education of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and President of the China Art Industry Park Alliance)
March 27, 2022 China Culture Daily
The first edition featured a special report
Creativity, Temperature, Quality: What the Art Park Brings to the City
Editor-in-charge: Chen Xiaoyue