Art Licensing--The Sky's the Limit

At the end of last year, customers' eyes lit up when they received their store gift from Taipei's Core Pacific City shopping center. Different from the overseas cartoon images that tend to be used on most products, like Hello Kitty, Betty Boop and Winnie the Pooh, the porcelain cups customers received were imprinted with a few cherries done in a bold brush, giving a real upbeat Chinese feeling. This is one example of the work of the artkey Art Image Licensing Center.

Acting as a bridge between the world of art and everday life, the artkey Art Image Licensing Center has some 60,000 pieces of artwork under its banner representing more than 700 Chinese artists worldwide.

Licensing rep for East Asian art

The center was founded in 1996 in the hope of becoming the key for every person to enter the world of art.

At an early age, founder Kuo I-cheng had set his sights on becoming a famous artist. Although he followed his parents' wishes and studied the more marketable landscape architecture, he later returned to the world of the arts, his first love. In addition to writing poetry and painting, he also sold art book sets and was an art promoter. But as the art exhibits he organized were patronized almost solely by the artists' friends and relatives, paintings didn't sell well and the galleries and artists had to cover the costs. Kuo then set up the artkey company. Using the then-new medium of the Internet as an art gallery, he staged the "SohoArt" Internet art exhibition and a "Top100 artworks" national artwork poll. He also set up a global Chinese arts directory and invited 100 artists to participate in a major exhibit over the Internet, giving artists, who previously had kept a respectful distance from technology, a real opportunity to get on the web. Despite the surprising flood of people attracted to this web-based project, putting art images on the net still brought only limited profit to the artists themselves.

And so, having first obtained an MBA from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, Kuo I-cheng began to take MA-level courses in law at Tunghai University as well as to study for a second masterate at Peking University's Institute of Social Economy and Culture, and began moving toward the idea of art licensing. This would start by locating artists, signing a licensing agreement and then digitizing their works, protecting them by obtaining the copyright, packaging them as completely new and distinct products and then finally returning royalties to the artists.

To date, artkey has signed agreements on both sides of the strait in 27 different categories with over 700 artists covering 60,000 separate pieces of art. Artists include oil painters like Chin Che-fu, Hsu Pi-hua and Chinese brush painters like Liu Kuo-sung, Ou Hau-nien, Yuan Chin-ta, print makers like Liao Shiou-ping, and installation artists like Fanchiang Ming-tao. At the same time, he has obtained the licensing rights to 600,000 catalogued "digitized authentic works" from the National Palace Museum, thus making artkey the largest licensing company for East Asian art in the world.

Van Gogh catches up to Mickey Mouse

The global licensing industry basically breaks down into seven categories: artwork and literature, brands and trade marks, toy action figures, entertainment, popular fashion, the Internet, and sports. According to the International Licensing Industry Merchandisers' Association, the gross worldwide output value of the industry in 2002 was NT$172.8 billion, representing an increase over the previous year of close to NT$7.2 billion. Although art licensing makes up only 9% of the total market, it recorded a respectable growth of NT$1 billion. While other categories are nearing a saturation point, art is experiencing a rapid takeoff and has enormous growth potential.

Although art licensing is still unfamiliar in Taiwan, Microsoft founder Bill Gates created Corbis more than ten years ago and set up offices all over the world seeking to obtain image licensing for works held by major American and European museums. Correctly foreseeing an emerging business opportunity, Gates established a branch of Corbis in Hong Kong in 1999.

A further analysis of art licensing points primarily to the use of images on household goods, hardware, household textiles, and toys and games, accounting for more than 60% of total output value. A well-known example of this in Taiwan: after the Dutch bank ABN AMRO acquired the license for a Van Gogh painting their bank cards saw an enormous 300% growth rate. Not only does such use of art works provide a permanent income for the original copyright holders, it also enhances a company's image and stature.

After eight years of hard work laying the foundation for the company, artkey executive vice-president Ivan Fan surveys the current scene and gives her analysis. After mainland China joined the World Trade Organization, intellectual property on both sides of the strait benefited from increased international protection. At the same time, another "East Asia fever" is set to grip the world as we come up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Added to this, the fact that the government in Taiwan is currently pushing hard to promote digital archives and the cultural industry means that "right now we see an opportune moment for the licensing of East Asian art."

The artist's ally

The licensing work of artkey chiefly revolves around the three categories of image licensing, product licensing, and digital licensing. The most difficult aspect is the first step of licensing the rights from the artist.

Not only do artists in general have quirky personalities, they have only a vague understanding of the licensing industry and the Internet. Some even reject the whole idea outright. For its ability to win the trust of the artists, artkey has relied on its contacts and friendships accumulated through its many years of experience in staging Internet art exhibitions and other activities. For example, in the case of Qi Baishi's works, since the artist himself is no longer alive and his descendants are split into southern and northern factions, Kuo I-cheng and Ivan Fan were in constant contact and negotiation with managers from both sides for some two years. At the same time they helped the descendants stage exhibits and publish picture albums. It was only at this point that they were successful in signing an agreement for this "super brand."

After getting this agreement, artkey will go about creating digital files containing material on the artist's life, works and awards, and descriptions of his art. Many artists under contract who will later have a need to call up these files will frequently go directly to artkey for assistance.

After getting the artist's agreement in principle, the actual writing of the contract is an art in itself. Questions relating to licensing name, area of use, term of the license, conditions and content-all these must be clearly set out before the interests of both the licensing company and the artist can be safeguarded.

"In the past some licensing companies just didn't care and forced artists to sign licensing agreements that covered 'all' of their works. And you know, this 'all' included creative work done in the past, present and future. They really strongarmed them," says Ivan Fan, deeply upset at this unfair treatment of the artists.

Classification

After a large body of licensed images has been amassed, it is necessary to take the next step and classify them to satisfy customer demand. The market for these images is diverse. Some customers might ask artkey to supply them with pictures compatible with the astrological sign Scorpio, while there have been some companies that wanted purple-colored art works to match the company's image, the color purple traditionally being associated with power, nobility and luxury. For this reason, in addition to a basic classification based on materials and artists, artkey has classified 60,000 licensed art products under distinct themes, such as color, blood type, astrological sign, gender, season, and characters depicted.

In addition to supplying art images on request, artkey itself offers a great many ready-made products for customers to choose from. For example, focusing on the youth market that the National Palace Museum has been courting, artkey used the dazzling and colorful scroll painting 100 Butterflies by Giuseppe Castiglione (1678-1766, known in Chinese as Lang Shining), a Jesuit priest from Milan who served as artist to the Qing court, to adorn the currently popular Swatch wristwatches and Nokia cell phones rather than the traditional museum shop items, like ties, letter openers, key chains and business card holders. They thus revolutionized at one stroke the refined and conservative image of National Palace Museum offerings.

Other artkey assets are the company's many years of experience in the digital reproduction of original works, the pricing for each item in 30 x 30 centimeter format, and its know-how in acquiring copyrights, in systems management and digital processing. The company can offer its services to government, academe and museums and provide them with a standard business plan for creating digital archives and licensing artwork.

Taking the museum home with you

Whenever you visit the National Palace Museum and see a favorite item, whether it's Liang Kai's (1127-1279) Immortal, the Tang-dynasty picture Ladies Playing at Court, the Qing-dynasty palace copy of the Upper River During the Qing Ming Festival scroll, or Giuseppe Castiglione's 100 Horses, you can enter artkey's "Digital Palace Museum Ordering System" in Chinese, English or Japanese and on the spot select your picture, pick a frame and take your high quality "digitized reproduction" of original art home with you.

Artkey, which has been striving to make art a part of everyday life, has plans in the works to develop products combining art with practicality, like porcelain ware, high-quality coffee cups, logo watches, thermos cups, computer mice, and carry-all bags. The President Chain Store Corporation has ordered New Year's table services, the Core Pacific City shopping center has bought customer gifts, Chunghwa Telecom and Taiwan Cellular Corporation offer downloadable images and the Carrefour superstore and Fubon Financial Group have also used artkey's services.

The "content" of these cultural products has been rich and varied but Taiwan, with its many downstream industries, has been short of something very important in the development of its culture industry-intermediaries who will make the connection to an artistic source, then apply technology so that art is transformed into a commodity of a different kind, and intangible culture can become a tangible industry.

Sipping some full-bodied coffee in a cup adorned with a picture by Liu Kuo-sung, running your computer mouse over one of Qi Baishi's works-artkey is the key that allows art to enter the everyday world and the bridge that leads from art to industry.