Nanjing University of the Arts
- Chinese name
- 南京艺术学院
- Pinyin
- Unified Social Credit Code
12320000466006789Bregistered in Jiangsu 江苏- Website
Nanjing University of the Arts (南京艺术学院), China’s oldest independent arts university, has made resurrecting its own founders as digital humans a signature of its graduation ritual. At the tenth 520 Graduation Showcase Carnival in May 2025, high-precision digital humans of the modern-education pioneer Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培) and the university’s founding president Liu Haisu (刘海粟) — the trailblazer of China’s new art movement — appeared on stage together to pass the torch of aesthetic education to graduates. Both were AI models trained by the university’s own faculty from historical film of the two men, roughly one minute of Cai’s surviving original audio, and only ten seconds of Liu’s; former president Feng Jianqin has described a young Communication School teacher building the Liu Haisu model on a corpus of his pre-1949 writings. For the 130th anniversary of Liu Haisu’s birth, the eleventh 520 carnival in May 2026 staged a digital human cross-time dialogue with him, and at the June 2026 graduation ceremony the digital Liu Haisu lit the ceremonial torch that was passed to the graduating class. Digital human production is also embedded in the university’s curriculum, with students demonstrating end-to-end capability from creative concept to realised digital human output, and the carnival itself is co-organised with the Gulou District government, Jiangsu Broadcasting Corporation and Nanjing’s cultural tourism authority.