Fei Jun
Chutian Metropolis Daily reporter Xu Ying correspondent Li Qian Yu Jiangping
The "Han Xizai Night Feast" App, which once swept the circle of friends in 2015, is an interactive experience application based on the collection of the Palace Museum, leading netizens to return to the literary and artistic life of the millennium in an immersive way, and is sought after by fans of the Forbidden City. Fei Jun, who participated in the creative planning of the app and served as the leader of the interactive experience design team, is a designer, artist and educator who has gone out from Hubei.
On July 13, Fei Jun, a professor at the School of Design of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, visited the Yangtze River Forum of the Provincial Library to give a lecture on the interpretation of "Digitization of Cultural Heritage", bringing readers a very cutting-edge digital interpretation experience. A reporter from Chutian Metropolis Daily interviewed him after the lecture.
The scene of the Yangtze River Pulpit
How to transform a flat picture into a body diagram? "Han Xizai's Night Feast" is the best teacher
Reporter: Can you reveal the interaction design ideas of "Han Xizai's Night Feast"?
Fei Jun: If Li Yu, the lord of the Southern Tang Dynasty, asked Gu Hongzhong to paint this "Han Xizai's Night Feast" is equivalent to making a documentary to record Han Xizai's nightlife, then it can be said that today, like Gu Hongzhong, we are entrusted by the Forbidden City to interpret this work in a new way. We can not destroy the appreciation of the painting itself, reading logic, but also hope to organically combine knowledge and appreciation, so that the audience can appreciate the work, but also can obtain knowledge about the work.
We also encountered many challenges, such as how to transform a flat two-dimensional picture into a three-dimensional picture, in fact, in this regard, the best teacher is the painter Gu Hongzhong. He used a lot of two-dimensional space removal methods when creating, And Mr. Ye Jintian explained that "this is an early film", and "Han Xizai's Night Feast" is indeed like an early comic strip, using montage techniques. How to turn the painting from flat to three-dimensional, from static to dynamic, combining history and today while being able to have a sense of experience through history, this is what our team has been trying to achieve, until the day before the release is still optimized.
Reporter: In this application, the finger is long pressed to illuminate the candle, how did the idea of "reading by candle night" come from?
Fei Jun: At that time, we wanted to use digital means to restore a kind of "reading by candle", that is, to hold a candle and enjoy the feeling of painting in a relatively dark environment, in general, we wanted to create a sense of substitution and immersion.
Reporter: "Han Xizai's Night Banquet", "Forbidden City Xiangrui", "Forbidden City Ceramics Museum" and other apps were quite popular with Forbidden City fans when they were launched, what prospects do you think are in this regard in the future?
Fei Jun: Today is an era of cultural rejuvenation, maybe twenty years ago we did not have the posture of self-confidence in our own culture, but now we are beginning to appreciate the charm of China's excellent traditional culture. At this time, it is very important to be a translator. Maybe I can't create a work like "Han Xizai's Night Feast", but I can be a translator of "Han Xizai's Night Feast". Being a good translator is as valuable as being original.
There is a certain fault line between young people and traditional excellent culture, and what the translator has to do is to repair this fault, we are not repairing it like a cultural relic, but through the digital transformation and narrative transformation, so that the excellent traditional culture is understood, consumed, and experienced.
The thirst for content has become a need for experience
Reporter: Two months ago, you participated in the "Venice Biennale" and developed an app called "Rui Xun" in combination with the theme of the Chinese Pavilion, and the audience could see another image of another Chinese bridge in its form by scanning a real Venetian bridge. This digital deduction is both a guided tour and a reflection of a cultural thinking that tells people how many similarities between the two civilizations existed 800 years ago. As a comprehensive cultural product of immersive exhibition + drama + technology, "Game Game 2" you did in Shanghai is very cutting-edge, and the ticket price has sold to more than 1,000 yuan, what qualities are needed to be a good curator?
Fei Jun: A good curator needs three dimensions: the philosophical dimension, the scientific dimension, and the artistic dimension to construct the grammar of his own narrative. As the technology displayed in the exhibition, it is not a high-end technology, and there is no problem in technical realization, the key is how the curator understands the culture to be conveyed, and then uses the technology to let the audience experience and have a relationship with people's lives.
We once did a very interesting technological experience in the underground parking lot, through projection, the ground is like a carpet, every person walks a step, there will be "ripples" under the feet, if you meet others, the "ripples" under the feet of the two people will also be fused together, which is very heartwarming.
Reporter: Now there is a direction that the museum is artistic, the space and exhibition are paying more and more attention to artistic feelings, the museumization of art museums, and the art museums pay attention to combing the history of art. And you also said that the competition of museums in the future is the competition with shopping malls. Why do you think the boundaries between spaces are becoming more and more blurred?
Fei Jun: More and more public spaces have begun to be museumized, more and more businesses will implant art exhibitions in commercial spaces in order to attract more consumers, and some shopping malls in Beijing even move dinosaur fossils inside for exhibition. This also reflects that people's needs have changed, and people's desire for content has become a cultural experience triggered by content, which is also a kind of experiential consumption.
This not only affects museums and art galleries, but also affects more public space participation. In the theater, too, experiential, immersive, and interactive have become new needs, no longer the relationship between "acting" and "viewing" as in the past, and the audience has even become a part of the work, and the audience has a dialogue with the work, which together constitute the work. This is a way for people to seek a sense of existence, a sense of gain.
In fact, a city is a big museum, how to link the history of this city with the lives of young people today through digital interpretation, is a very worthwhile and promising cause.
A high-tech product offered by a museum without a sense of experience can only be a bunch of things
Reporter: Now the museum also attaches great importance to the application of cultural creativity and high technology, and the Forbidden City has done a relatively good job in this regard, but some local venues may still have two skins, such as cultural creation still staying in the stacking and collage of cultural symbols, without excavating or extracting cultural connotations, and the application of high technology has not mobilized the audience's heart. What do you think is the biggest difficulty behind this?
Fei Jun: In the past, museums often did exhibitions in two ways: one was to cooperate with exhibition companies, display companies, and decoration companies to decorate exhibition halls, and the other was to cooperate with companies that sold equipment, such as AR, VR, robots, panoramic projection, etc. The most painful experience I have ever had in the industry is that the decoration company has separated the space of the exhibition hall, and then the exhibition organizer said, Teacher Fei, where do you see where to add a screen to display digital content? What we have to do is experience planning, a bunch of high-tech products provided by a museum without a sense of experience, can only be a bunch of things. Sometimes instead of enhancing the experience, it becomes a chicken rib.
The biggest problem in our industry is the lack of system planning capabilities and the lack of systematic planning talents. Everyone sticks to their own subject areas, experts consider how to objectively present my research results on cultural relics, and do not think much about whether the audience can understand them; people who do technology, consider how I apply the latest technology; people who do exhibitions, consider the display of space.
Reporter: Since the museum opened for free in 2008, it has received a large number of visitors every day, taking the Hubei Provincial Museum as an example, which is often visited by tens of thousands of people a day at its peak. With such a large number of visits, can it still be experienced by the audience?
Fei Jun: This is indeed a relatively Chinese problem, after the museum is opened for free, the number of visitors it accepts is a problem that Western museums do not face. On the one hand, to meet the huge audience of visits, does not mean that on the other hand, we can not introduce new mechanisms in the narrative.
Our current museum display of the audience is not hierarchical, and can only meet the people who are walking in the flowers. Through digital interpretation, it is possible to meet the cultural content experience of people at different levels of overview, moderate demand, and depth demand, which is promising.
Biography:
Born in 1970 in Shashi, Hubei Province, Fei Jun graduated from the Department of Central American Printmaking in the early 1990s, and then went to the Electronic Art Research Institute of Alfred University in the United States to study electronic interactive art, and is currently teaching at the Digital Media Studio of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.