Digital veteran offers high def ideas to Palace Museum

Auspicious Symbols in the Forbidden City, an Apple app designed by Fei Jun and his team for the Palace Museum in 2013.

A Chinese digital veteran is helping one of the world's busiest museums conduct business with smartphone apps.

Fei Jun, 45, calls himself an "artist, designer and educator" in one of his online profiles. The tech-savvy associate professor of interactive media at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, is a key figure behind Palace Museum's recent smartphone app that allows virtual visitors to the museum, an understanding of ancient Chinese paintings.

Night Revels of Han Xizai, the app named after one such artwork, was launched last month in a bid to enhance interest of young Chinese in China's ancient culture. The painting titled, Night Revels of Han Xizai, was first created in the Southern Tang Dynasty (AD 937-975) that ruled what is today's southern and central China, and reflects how the highly placed government official Han Xizai tried to escape his home state when he realized the dynasty's end was near.

"I call myself a translator of traditional arts for today's museum visitors," Fei says. "Frankly speaking, modern youth no longer has enough cultural contexts to feel attached to rich contents reserved in museums. What we do is better help them understand it."

The recent app, for instance, he says, hides more than 100 explanatory notes in high-definition formats.

This isn't Fie's first cooperation with the Palace Museum. In 2013, Fie and his team at his own operation Moujiti (meaning "some group"), founded in 2014, designed Auspicious Symbols in the Forbidden City, an app explaining the cultural connotations of auspicious symbols on relics, for the most-visited museum in the world (more than 15 million visitors were recorded in 2014).

The app also stirred public discussion on symbols.

"Museums should take more responsibilities to educate the public today rather than quietly protect cultural relics," says he.

His Beijing-based private company specializes in digital design.

Virtual museums became a pathfinder for Fei and his team in the backdrop of major cultural institutions like the Palace Museum demanding that their guests be given the best of technological assistance in understanding the country's history and culture.

The Palace Museum plans to open its digital exhibition hall later this year, and Moujiti has also joined the project. Visitors will have opportunities to experience different circumstances in the virtual space, including mimics of palaces that are closed to the public. The surroundings will change according to spectators' action, which may feel more like a motion sense game.