In early August, the National Palace Museum and the Taiwan Design Center unveiled their "New Design for Generation Y" at the Eslite Bookstore on Taipei's Dunhua South Road.

When cultural artifacts are retooled for Generation Y, the painting Spring Festival on the River becomes a digital postcard to send to friends, an imperial jade scepter becomes a combination lock, and a phoenix pattern becomes a fashionable purse. The bold, youthful designs not only bring the artwork alive but give the museum's stuffy image a makeover.

The second phase of the marketing plan is set for mid-October, when five local designers will unveil their creations, drawing on the museum's resources in a series called "Old is New." The company Bright Ideas has turned an image of a boy and girl in a Song Dynasty painting into the sort of dolls the younger generation love to collect, and the 02 Design Company has incorporated a image of birds and animals dating to the Hongshan neolithic culture into an ice-cube trays and lollipops.

In the third phase, internationally renowned manufacturer of kitchen utensils Alessi will produce items featuring cartoon images based on portraits of the Qianlong Emperor. "In the 21st century, you don't come to the National Palace Museum to pay homage to the masterworks but rather to find your own style," says museum deputy director Lin Mun-lee.

Through licensed reproduction, cultural artifacts can multiply into souvenirs that delight museum visitors. Pictured is a reproduction of late Shang dynasty zun-vessel in the form of a sheep.

The National Palace Museum has sold books, CD-ROMs, reproductions, and other souvenirs for years. The gift shop has all sorts of items for sale, including keychains shaped like the museum's famous jade cabbage, tiger-shaped letter openers, and silk scarves with blue and white patterns from porcelain. There's a broad selection of fine stationery, jade, brocade, porcelain, and accessories.

Hsu Hsiao-te, head of the National Palace Museum Cultural Arts Fund, which markets the products, says that the museum has carried more than 2,000 items, and currently more than 1,000 are on offer. They are on sale in the museum's gift shop, as well as locations in the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, the Taiwan Handicraft Promotion Center, the Taichung County Seaport Art Center, the Hsinchu Cultural Affairs Bureau, and the Taipei Living Mall. They take in around NT$200 million every year. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, however, has over 20,000 different items for sale in 32 locations around the world and takes in NT$1.1 billion a year--a sure sign that the National Palace Museum has room to grow.

Of course, it's not a fair comparison. The publicly funded National Palace Museum has never had in-house designers or marketers. All its souvenirs are designed and produced by outside companies, then approved by the museum before sale. It was only in 2001 that the museum found-ed its Cultural Arts Fund. The organization currently has just 13 employees, and only four are experts in design and marketing--it's no comparison with the commercialized Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Cultural Arts Fund is low on manpower, but it is winning kudos for its achievements. In addition to organizing collaborations with Taiwanese and foreign designers, it also actively seeks out well-known vendors each season to sell those items and help the museum break out of the limitations of its own six outlets.

One example is the collaboration with the well-known Taiwanese ceramics maker Franz Collection. Franz incorporated images of a pair of swallows resting among peach blossoms from a work by Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian artist of the Qing court, into vases, spoons, and teapots. These items will be on sale in Franz's more than 500 retail outlets around the world.

"Next, we plan to work with Eslite Bookstore, the forty largest hotels in Taiwan, and 7-Eleven," Hsu says. He hopes that museum merchandise will reach more people through the partnerships with businesses and that the museum's digitized collection will expand from educational use into people's everyday lives.

Deputy Director Lin Mun-lee, a specialist in contemporary art, has adopted an "old is new" mentality in her efforts to bring local and international designers into the museum on artistic exchange.

According to International Licensing Manufacturer's Association statistics, the licensing of arts-related merchandise was a US$18 billion industry in 2002. With an eye on this market, representatives from the National Palace Museum attended the world's largest licensing trade fair in New York this summer. The museum hopes that by licensing, it can cash in on the "Asia fever" now sweeping the globe.

While the museum is actively developing its image licensing market, it is also using digitization technology to enter the world of virtual reproductions. The images are of such high quality that even experts have taken them for the real thing.

Currently, the most popular reproductions at the museum are produced by Epson subsidiary JetPrint. Since its founding in 2002, JetPrint has sought to bring digital printing up to the standards demanded by the arts, and create an alternative to traditional lithography.

JetPrint receives traditional film negatives from the National Palace Museum, then digitizes them with high-resolution scanners. Various modes accommodate the different qualities of antique, oil-paint, and photographic source images, and the scanned image is saved as a high-resolution file. It is then fine-tuned by experts and printed out on special paper developed in Japan to simulate antique paintings. The result is a near-perfect replica.

As JetPrint doesn't have the originals on hand, they call in experts from the museum to examine each reproduction. The experts draw upon their decades of experience to tell the printer operators the birds' feathers should be softer, or the browns and reds should be more like minerals, or such advice, and the image is adjusted again. Spring Festival on the River had more than a dozen seals imprinted on it, each of a different shade, and it took three months of adjustments to get it just right.

In addition to JetPrint, the world-renowned reproduction company Tokyo Shashinsha also works with the National Palace Museum. Their reproductions even show the marks of age and restoration of the original, and are so faithful that they have fooled many an expert. They even caused customs officials to think someone was trying to make off with a National Treasure! A reproduction of a Song Dynasty work by Zhao Chang in celebration of the new year is worth NT$1.2 million, and one of a four-character calligraphic work by Song Dynasty emperor Huizong is worth NT$54,000. At more than NT$10,000 per character, that's quite a cultural inheritance!

These old images are finding new life. The National Palace Museum has vaults in the mountains of Taipei's Waishuanghsi district filled with more than 7,000 precious works from the Song Dynasty on. Once these hit the image licensing market, the octogenarian National Palace Museum is sure to become a goldmine.

Ancient artifacts are transformed through the creative imagination of Generation Y students into a new line of products.

Ancient artifacts are transformed through the creative imagination of Generation Y students into a new line of products.

Thanks to digital technology, the museum's digital imaging has reached new heights. Not only can the images be printed out quickly, they can also be resized and cropped.

Ancient artifacts are transformed through the creative imagination of Generation Y students into a new line of products.

The peach blossoms and pair of swallows in Qing dynasty painter Giuseppe Castiglione's renowned painting soar on Franz porcelains and on teapots. The museum is expanding its retail network by collaborating with a number of different industries.

Ancient artifacts are transformed through the creative imagination of Generation Y students into a new line of products.