Tan Ping: Saying "no" to digital replicas of cultural relics

Date:2022.04.12 - 2022.04.12

On April 11, Art Exhibitions China held a meeting on standardizing the authorization of NFT collections. Leaders of various departments, project team leaders ,and representatives of some intellectual property institutions attended the meeting. The overall deployment has been made on Art Exhibitions China participating in the research and development of NFT collections from the museums. In addition, the organization has made specific demands in terms of launching trials, authorization mechanism, content moderation, brand management ,and cooperative institutions selection.

The progress of more than ten NFT collection projects in the organization was reported at the meeting, and various departments carried out feasibility assessments on the project content, the platform comparison ,and selection as well as partners’ qualifications. The organization will set up a working group on launching and reviewing NFT collections, which will be responsible for the research and development of NFT collections from the museums as well as other related reviews and supervision in the organization. The working group will establish a legal aid center for intellectual property rights in the museum in cooperation with well-known legal services. Measures for the management in launching the NFT collections will be formulated to explore the digitization in the museums.

Tan Ping, director of Art Exhibitions China, pointed out that the NFT market has a considerable large scale and bright prospects with various categories. However, it contains large market and regulatory risks. Thus, it is necessary to prevent the risks and promote some innovative ways to bring cultural relics coming to alive, so as to carry out creative transformation and innovative development of excellent traditional Chinese culture. Tan Ping stressed that Art Exhibitions China should carry out the research and development on NFT collections of cultural relics, which must be guided by the national policy.

On the basis of legitimacy and exclusiveness, the collection should be legitimate, secure ,and unique and emphasize its public feature. Tan Ping pointed out that we should say "no" to digital replicas of cultural relics and encourage artists to design the collections of cultural relics with artistic quality, uniqueness and scarcity. Based on the connotation of cultural relics, the collections need to tell Chinese stories with the help of new technologies.

Art Exhibitions China will clean up the NFT collections merely replicating the cultural relics and establish a review mechanism for creating the digital images of state-owned cultural relics. Also, the organization should fully guarantee the museums in creating and selling their NFT collections, providing positive guidance to museums in authorizing their collections and developing their intellectual property rights, as well as playing an important role as the "national team" to lead and guide the NFT collections.