The annual Japan Media Arts Festival integrates fine arts, entertainment, animation and graphic novels and now for the first time it brings some of its high-end products to Shanghai.At Shanghai Sculpture Space, the exhibition titled "Japan Media Arts Festival in Shanghai 2007" is open through Sunday. Since the festival began in 1997, people from all over the world have submitted works and many of the prize-winning artists are displaying works in the city.As a trend of modernization, in each independent industry the workers are increasingly specialized, divided into more and more detailed and specific units and jobs. This means one may be able to master only one specific skill to meet the needs of only a small part while all the staff can be integrated for a huge product.But this festival is intended to go in the opposite direction and it is even doing better - it's designed to break down the boundaries between different industries. Art, technology and personnel from different domains can be interactive and their fusion is creating new artistic ideas and new works.The exhibition hall is divided into three areas where 96 works are displayed. Area A is themed "Earth," Area B is "Tokyo" and C is "Expression."Area A shows works about Earth, nature and social information. Area B consists of videos about Tokyo from different perspectives. Area C, the most diversified, is a complex of interactive fine art works, video games, cartoons and animation, manga (graphic novels) and movie trailers.The exhibition is a good opportunity to see the top works in these fields by Japanese artists and industry talents. The works show how well art can be integrated with entertainment and how well advanced technology can be integrated with artistic sensibility. In such a way people can better understand the concept "Japan, a nation creates a culture of joy."In Japan there's something very much different from the practice in the corresponding domains in China or Western countries. In Japan there's hardly any boundary between different art forms and creators. People can just take elements very freely from each others' fields and in this way it's always likely for "hybrid" works to be born.For example, some works are very difficult to classify even if the creators have not intentionally avoided classification. Interactive art is normally classified into the high-end of fine arts because it's comparatively based on computer technology. However, the video game from the major game company SEGA, "Virtual Fighters," is a piece of ordinary interactive work on display.The three-dimensional fighting game was first developed in the early 1990s and the first episode is recorded in history as the first three-dimensional fighting game.Maybe in no other place than Japan can we see a "pop" and "commercial" product accepted as a piece of fine art work. But it's no surprise for the Japanese because we can also see that games and other small "tricks" on cell phones are considered works of fine art.Similarly, a graphic novelist such as Inoue Takehiko is also considered a true artist in Japan. Although there's only one replica of his new comic, Takehiko is not a strange name to Westerners because his master piece "Slam Dunk" has won him worldwide fame.Usually graphic novels and other forms of entertainment are considered too popular to be "high" art, and the story of HR Giger, the concept artist for the movie "Alien," shows how big a gulf there can be between the entertainment industry and the "high" art circle in some countries. But this exhibition shows that can never happen in Japan.