Museums in China Are Facing COVID-19 with Countermeasures
The February of 2020, a month that was supposed to celebrate the Chinese Spring Festival nationwide, has been eternally correlated to an unprecedented universal pandemic—COVID-19 in the Chinese people’s memory. Being the first country attacked by this unknown pandemic, almost places across the country had cancelled cultural tourism activities and temporarily closed scenic spots from mid January of 2020. In the midst of public cultural places, museums, art galleries and other cultural institutions bear the burnt of the stagnation that this pandemic has brought about to the cultural industries in China. For the purpose of tiding over this difficult lag phase, every major museums were going to offer “Cloud Exhibition” service as the primary solution in the initial. All the audiences can visit museum exhibitions online through various “digital museum” platforms. In simultaneous, the third-party on internet platform has joined to the co-operations with major museums in the term of exploiting the museum intellectual property so as to build “museum plus internet” network, which is expected to boost China’s cultural IP industrialization. Observations on activities and services updated on museum websites, mainstream medias and China’s We-Media, the virtual platforms have already become one pivotal method for traditional museums to overcome the stagnation during this tough period of COVID-19 in China. Shall we think it likely that in the post COVID-19 period, the museum enterprise in China and even in the worldwide would usher in a fresh new era?