Museums Solicit Amusing Captions from Netizens

--"Oh crap, another mistake!"

    --"It’s really hard being an editor."

(A Pair of Figures in Celadon from Hunan Provincial Museum)

Five Chinese museums launched a joint campaign on Friday to solicit humorous captions for their displays, asking netizens to come up with amusing captions for the purpose of encouraging more young people to visit museums.

The "Show the Cuteness of Museums" campaign will last for one month, allowing Internet users to share hilarious captions for museum displays on Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblogging website.

The provincial museums of Shanxi, Hunan and Hubei, as well as the National Museum of China and the Capital Museum, organized the campaign.

A jury will be created to select the best captions and award the contributors, organizers said.

The campaign is part of several events being held to celebrate International Museum Day, which also fell on Friday.

"This event echoes the themes of this year’s International Museum Day with its aim to make museums more attractive, more sincere and more innovative," said Duan Zhisha, administrator of the Shanxi provincial museum’s microblog account.

A photo of four bronze sculptures posted on the Shanxi museum’s blog received many humorous responses, with netizens coming up with amusing descriptions of the poses struck by the bronze figures.
The sculptures were used to weigh down floor mats and date back to the West Han dynasty (220 BC - AD 9), Duan said.

Amused by the captions, local resident Zhao Xinrong visited the Shanxi provincial museum on Friday.

"This entertaining campaign encourages ordinary people like me to learn more about antiques that used to seem boring to us," Zhao said.

Zhang Changhai, a researcher with an archaeological institution in Shanxi, said the campaign has already been successful in encouraging more people to visit museums.

"Museums and antiques were considered ’serious’ in the past, but we are trying to encourage people to find fun in them," Zhang said.

Microblogging has become an effective way for museums to interact with potential visitors, he said.

"People, especially the young, are growing more fond of museums and cultural relics, but it is far from enough," he said.

An Laishun, vice president and secretary-general of the Chinese Museum Association, said that 100 of the association’s 400 registered museums have opened official microblog accounts over the last two years for the purpose of improving interaction with the public.

"Microblogs not only allow us to tell stories about relics in an entertaining way, but also serve as a source of inspiration for museum workers and artists," An said.