On the 360-degree enveloping dome, the immortals in the artist's dream land float back into place and turn into a magnificent and majestic mural. The audience was amazed or fascinated, and was already intoxicated by the legendary story of the murals of Fahai Temple...... In the middle of summer, the Fahai Temple Mural Art Museum located at the southern foot of Cuiwei Mountain is full of tourists. Since its trial operation at the beginning of last year, the exhibition hall, which uses China's leading digital means to display and interpret cultural relics, has received tens of thousands of visitors, and has become a new and beautiful cultural tourism check-in place in western Beijing.
Fahai Temple has "five uniques", among which the murals of Fahai Temple are the most praised, which can be called the most mural paintings of the Ming Dynasty in China. Due to the requirement that the original murals need to be protected from light, the murals in the Daxiong Treasure Hall of Fahai Temple can receive very limited visits every day, and tourists cannot fully and clearly appreciate the full picture of the murals. After the opening of the Fahai Temple Mural Art Museum, visitors can not only watch the "national treasures" with flashlights in the dark hall, but also take advantage of the wings of science and technology to see the murals of Fahai Temple clearly with the help of digital technologies such as high-definition giant display screens, 360-degree three-dimensional surround floor domes, and full-channel immersive light and shadow shows.
Walking into the exhibition hall on the basement floor of the art museum, you will be greeted by the statue of Guanyin of the Water Moon, which is more than 3 meters high, which is one of the most representative figures in the murals of Fahai Temple. From head to toe, she wore a white gauze dress as thin as a cicada's wings, and the skin, streamers, jewels, and ornaments under the gauze were clearly visible. The Fahai Temple Mural Art Museum has digitally magnified the mural in a "microscope" way, allowing the viewer to see more microscopic details: the white gown is composed of countless six-sided petals, each of which has 48 thin lines painted in it. When the viewer looks further, they can also see that the effect of the six-sided petals on the left and right sides of the tulle coat is different, so it can be speculated that it was not painted by the same person.
In the Fahai Temple Mural Art Museum, the murals of the Ming Dynasty nearly 600 years ago not only allow visitors to "see clearly", but also "see interestingly". When it comes to the short film "Dream of Fahai" in the dome theater that fascinates tourists, Li Xuming, the person in charge of the Fahai Temple Mural Art Museum, introduced that all the characters and animal images in the short film are based on the murals of Fahai Temple. "In the process of studying the murals of Fahai Temple, we can see that there are many traces of brush changes, and perhaps the painters encountered some problems in the creative process. So we took the painters Wan Fuqing and Wang Shu as the protagonists of the film, telling the story of how they wanted to do things well in the mural creation, but they couldn't start writing for a long time, so inspired by the dream, they let go of the obsession in their hearts and created the story of the mural that left a name in history. ”
Behind the exquisite digital display of the art museum, there are more than 40 pixel-level mural 3D models and nearly 1,000 2D models, which make the "sleeping" murals jump on the screen and make them more infectious. In order to allow visitors to experience the "Eighteen Strokes" in the traditional Chinese Gongbi painting method, the museum specially asked the painter to recreate a mural and record it in the form of real photography. Visitors can also interact with the mural through screens, virtual reality equipment, etc., to further deepen their understanding and feeling of mural art.
If the cool visual effects of light and shadow are the coat, then the academic value of the cultural relics of the murals of Fahai Temple is the core of the whole exhibition. "When using science and technology to explain the artistic value of cultural relics, cultural and museum institutions should pay attention to the combination of content and technology, the visitors' experience of the exhibition, the authenticity and accuracy of historical knowledge, and the inheritance and popularization of culture." Li Xuming said that in the curatorial process of the museum, according to different themes, such as the rheology of human figures, the analysis of clothing and armor, the creation process and painting methods, etc., the connotation of the murals of Fahai Temple was deeply excavated vertically. At the same time, nearly 100 cultural relics, grottoes and other materials at home and abroad are also selected to compare horizontally with the murals of Fahai Temple, so that the audience can further understand the source and influence of the murals of Fahai Temple.
"In the Daxiong Treasure Hall, I felt the moving spirit of the original murals of Fahai Temple; At the Fahai Temple Mural Art Museum, I began to read the stories behind these murals. A tourist's exclamation illustrates the complementary relationship between the original murals and the recreation of digital art in the visiting experience. Nowadays, the one-stop check-in of the original murals of Fahai Temple and the Fahai Temple Mural Art Museum has become a common play strategy for many tourists. According to the statistics of the art museum, about 30% of the tourists who come to visit are parent-child audiences.
Since its opening, on the basis of doing a good job in the digital display of cultural relics, the Fahai Temple Mural Art Museum has also carried out a series of explorations and practices in the integration of culture and tourism, such as regularly inviting experts and scholars in the field of history and culture to hold cultural lectures, so that the audience can experience projects such as "Gongbi Heavy Color", "Powder and Gold" and "Non-genetic Extension" under professional guidance. In the coming summer, the Fahai Temple Mural Art Museum will also hold a wealth of cultural experience activities, including summer camps, training camps for little docents and volunteers, traditional Chinese handicraft experience, academic lectures, etc., and provide two public lectures per day for the audience, so that more people can enjoy the beauty of traditional Chinese culture.