How to Draw Nutrition from Chinese Traditional Arts and Crafts for Modern Designs

With the rapid development of social economy, the role of design art to modern society is more and more obvious, especially into the twenty-first century, the development of design art has entered into a period of unprecedented prosperity. The arrival of the information age makes the communication of design art as dense as the river with water, and the continuous emergence of new materials and new technologies makes us dazzled. Although designers for the design elements of the use of flowers contain Ying, colorful, but by the potential impact of stereotypes, designers are always accustomed to the thinking of contemporary visual elements as the design of creative bricks, and then ignored the traditional elements of the modern design art revelation.

The Chinese nation has five thousand years of cultural heritage, our ancestors have left us a vast sea of cultural elements. Each traditional element has a deep cultural deposits, are engraved with a deep national brand, these cultural elements of beauty is the treasure of the Chinese nation, is the crystallization of the wisdom of the Chinese people - extensive and profound. It has been said that "what is national is global." Although, this argument is still in constant debate, it is undeniable that the excavation and attention of the world's countries to their own national culture has reached an unprecedented state. In today's "cultural fast food" "cultural penetration" and other cultural borderless environment, each country has the characteristics of the national culture of the traditional elements more and more show the precious value.

In the field of modern design in China, due to the influx and penetration of various new trends from abroad, the ensuing new ideas and concepts have shaken our inherent values and aesthetics, causing us to lose our own right to speak, and the design works are increasingly far from the national personality. How to recognize the ****-born relationship between traditional elements and modern design, so that their application in modern design art is more extensive and in-depth; how to combine traditional Chinese elements wonderfully with modern design art reasonably, not only to respect the uniqueness of the national art, but also reflect the aesthetic psychology of the Chinese nation, and reflect the inner spiritual pursuit of the modern people, is an important topic pursued and faced by a new generation of designers.

1, modern design art of creative thinking and design elements

Design art can not be missing creativity, creativity is a mental journey of perception. "The core of design creativity is creative thinking, which runs through the entire design activity. The significance of 'creativity' lies in the purposeful activity of breaking through the boundaries of existing things and embodying human beings' initiative in transforming the objective world and developing a new value system and way of life in the form of a brand new concept or form of originality and novelty." [①]

The process of creativity is a series of reorganization of design elements and innovative thinking. The first thing a designer thinks of when receiving a design task is the goal of the design, and then consider how to achieve the identified goal, through the creative brewing, epiphany to realize the transcendence and sublimation of the design. The creative process of design is often not a smooth sailing, often appear "the end of the mountain" phenomenon, and even to the "bag of clothes gradually widen the end of no regrets, for Yi consume people haggard" situation. [②] We often summarize the design practice, the designer's biggest enemy is himself, that is, how the designer beyond themselves, how to break through their own thinking.

At the 2007 China-Wuhan Art Education Summit Forum, Prof. Xu Ping of the Central Academy of Fine Arts pointed out the unhealthy logic of a society: "Design is industrial, industrial is western, western is modern, modern is scientific, and scientific is progressive". Some people even think: "China's design development level is lagging behind because of the obstruction of the spread of Western design" and so on similar arguments and thinking abound. We in the domestic graphic advertising design, often appear in all-English advertising language and copy, some designers unilaterally think that the design works plus Chinese on the rustic, some works know that the face of the Chinese audience, or pile up a number of English words or combinations of letters, and some for the sake of "claptrap" and even put together some hanyu pinyin, that is, by doing so, the work can be foreign style. Some even put in some Chinese pinyin for the sake of "claptrap", thinking that by doing so, the work will be foreignized. In fact, we are still looking for money all over the world, and many times foreign designers are looking for inspiration from the East, from Chinese elements.

Just aired in the CCTV gold channel of a costume drama TV series, I especially noticed that the cast list of the subtitles, in a famous Chinese actor's name after the addition of a bracket, brackets, deliberately stated "British nationality", compared with many of the actors who have previously appeared in the program, this small change, in this case, there is no "foreign guest". This small change, compared to many previous programs in which the actor has appeared, is particularly striking in a show that does not have a single "foreign guest" in it. Let's not analyze whether the actor really joined the British nationality for some reason, but the appearance of this "foreign guest" also reflects a social phenomenon - pandering to foreigners. The design world is more so, we are often around people bragging about their own design style from the study of Japanese design, so and so Japanese designers as the grandmaster, but did not fundamentally recognize the cultural heritage of the Japanese designers or by the deep influence of ancient Chinese culture. Accustomed to the mirror from the Western aesthetic thinking to shine their own imitation style of a helpless face is the current design of the creative thinking of the confusion.

Modern Chinese art educator Chen Zhifo mentioned in the "talk about several problems of arts and crafts design": "all artistic creation or craft design, can not get rid of the old set of constraints, can not break through the stereotypes, unique style, familiar but not raw, which is not in line with the requirements of artistic creation." [③] We are living in a highly modernized and informatized era, the constant emergence of new materials, new inventions, and new technologies dazzles us, and under this situation, we are faced with the problem of how to recognize the relationship between traditional elements and modern design, and also the problem of how to inherit and carry forward the elements of the outstanding national traditions in our modern artistic creativity. From a new perspective, jumping out of the rational, logical, straight-line thinking, get rid of the inertia of thinking, the traditional elements of China to recombine, seeking differences in the same, seeking the same in the differences, i.e., the old elements, new combinations, new creativity, new breakthroughs.

2, Chinese traditional elements in the design vein

Professor Yin Dingbang mentioned in the preface of his book "Introduction to Design": "Since ancient times, the base of human wisdom has been no more than two aspects: one is the material aspect, which relies on the modeling and design to be implemented; and the other is the immaterial aspect, which relies on the ideology, system, public opinion, and etiquette to be realized. If there is a third aspect it is a synthesis of the two." [④] Through the above three aspects, material is the foundation and needs to be implemented by design specifically, it is enough to see the great influence of design on the whole world civilization and its development.

In recent years, from the fields of graphic design, industrial design, environmental art design to architectural design, there are more and more applications of traditional Chinese elements, what exactly are the things that represent traditional Chinese elements in the design vein? In a sense, elements are symbols, and symbols are the medium for loading and transmitting information, a simplified means of recognizing things.

Chinese culture has a long history, and traditional cultural elements are naturally vast. From the cultural level, "culture is the sum of the various modes and products of human activity, including the range of material, spiritual and artistic production, i.e., including the full richness of the forms of human agency in society." [⑤] The anthropologist Franz Boaz has divided culture into three categories from the point of view of cultural structure:

(1) Material culture - acquisition, preservation, and processing of food, houses, clothes, the process of manufacturing crafts, the products of things, the laws of transportation, etc.

(2) Social relations - general economic status, property rights, war, tribal relations at peace, personal status within the tribe, tribal, clan, and family organization, forms of communication, and personal relations on the basis of sex and age.

(3) Art, Religion, Ethics - Decoration, painting, sculpture, songs, stories, dances, attitudes and actions against the state of nature, the state of divine existence, etc. [6]

The traditional Chinese elements in the design vein can be sorted out from the above veins, which can be said to be only a few. Traditional cultural elements naturally include a wide range of elements, we can only be like the sea of art to pick up shells like a small part of the elements such as:

Chinese paintings, Chinese calligraphy, seal carving seals, Dunhuang frescoes, the four treasures of the literary house (ink stone, brushes, Xuanpian paper, ink);

Qin bricks and Han tiles, the Terracotta Warriors; Peking Opera face painting, shadow, martial arts;

Chinese knots, red lanterns (palace lanterns, gauze lanterns);

Woodblock watermarks, Zhongdingwen, Han Dynasty bamboo slips, oracle bone inscriptions , Zhongdingwen, Han Dynasty bamboo slips, vertically-arranged wire-bound books;

Tang suits, dragon and phoenix motifs (Taotie, Ruyi, Lei, Hui, Ba), auspicious cloud motifs, Chinese weaving and embroidery (embroidery, etc.);

Chinese lacquerware, paper cuttings, kites, chopsticks;

colorful ceramics, purple clay pots, Chinese porcelains;

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Couplets, door gods, New Year's paintings, firecrackers, riddles, stone lions, lion dances;

Flagstones, pagodas, the Great Wall;

Mid-autumn mooncakes, dumplings, zongzi, sugar gourds;

Golden treasures, jades, yuyi, bagua, and so on ......

Everywhere else there are also local and ethnic specialties. It is difficult to cite examples. Thousands of years of civilization has left us a colorful treasure trove of art, in our country so deep cultural background, designers from which the design source is inexhaustible, it may often give you an unexpected design insight.

3, the design of traditional Chinese elements in the vein of modern design art revelation

China's contemporary artists, Mr. Zhang Daoyi once mentioned: "Zhang Guolao backward donkey, riding on a donkey to look up and down thousands of years, tens of thousands of miles across the country, all shapes and sizes, all kinds of things, in the comparison of the identification, in the phenomenon of the outline, to figure out a line of thought, the donkey carrying Moving forward to a new era, not sticking to the old pedantry, but creators of new to open up the future." [⑦]

As the traditional elements of China handed down for thousands of years, how do we make them can be well inherited and utilized as a useful revelation for modern design art. These things are in the Chinese nation for thousands of years in the accumulation of culture, with a strong oriental color, in modern design can find a lot of use of its position, through the wisdom of creative thinking, so that its derivation into a new design elements, for our modern art design services.

The upcoming Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, ushered in a once-in-a-lifetime design opportunity for Chinese designers, in the subconscious mind of the general public, the series of designs for the Olympic Games must be a design style with an international perspective, in line with international design trends. When one by one the design projects recognized by the International Olympic Committee gradually surfaced, we suddenly discovered that the design works for the Olympic Games are still the blood of the Chinese nation flowing in the bones. Starting from "Taijiquan", the logo of Beijing Olympic bid designed by Chen Shaohua and Han Meilin, the design of Beijing Olympic Games has become a testing ground for Chinese elements.

The Beijing Olympic bid logo adopts the typical colors of the five Olympic rings, with a vivid graphic representation of the dynamic posture of a person playing taijiquan, and is also a pattern of traditional Chinese handicrafts, i.e., "concentric knot" or "Chinese knot", which implies the Chinese blood with its simple flowing lines. It is also a traditional Chinese handicraft pattern, the "Concentric Knot" or "Chinese Knot", which, with its simple flowing lines, implies beauty, harmony and dynamism, and symbolizes the unity, cooperation and communication among the peoples of the world. (See Figure 1.) It was the Chinese elements in this work that y impressed every official of the Organizing Committee and became the biggest visual contributor to the success of the Olympic bid. It also led to a social trend of unprecedented love for the "Chinese knot" among the Chinese people.

Next, in the expectation of hundreds of millions of people, the birth of the Beijing 2008 Olympic logo "Dancing Beijing" - China Seal. The logo is in the form of a unique, 5,000-year-old Chinese seal, combined with the charm of traditional Chinese calligraphy, combining traditional Chinese elements with the modern Olympic spirit, fully reflecting the connotation of the theme of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and the design also makes the "China Seal" dance from China to the rest of the world.

The design of the Beijing 2008 Olympic medals received wide attention from all walks of life, and the design team of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, after a long period of brewing, exploring, and conceptualizing, finally established the form of Chinese jade, which was unanimously praised by the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games and the society.

Beijing Olympic torch creative is also a typical case of Chinese cultural symbols successfully used in modern design, the torch is designed by the Lenovo Group Innovation Design Center collective design, inspired by the history of our country has been a very long time "Xiangyun" pattern, the Xiangyun on behalf of the "origin ** birth, harmony ** ** ** ** ** **, the Olympic Games, the Olympic Games, the Olympic Games, the Olympic Games, the Olympic Games, the Olympic Games, the Olympic Games and the community. **It is also one of the traditional symbols with the most Chinese characteristics. The design of the torch is inspired by the traditional Chinese paper scroll, which is one of the four great inventions of China, and with the emergence of paper, human civilization has been spread.

"I've been looking for it for a thousand years. When I look back, the person is in the place where the lights go out." [8] Without the "thousand degrees" of searching up and down, there will be no sudden epiphany and understanding. The reason why the above design can be reflected in the design of the national cultural connotations, the Chinese elements skillfully integrated into the design, the key is the designer's knowledge background and the ability to understand the national culture, as well as the understanding of the national culture after the natural emotional outflow, while reflecting the Chinese elements to bring cultural inspiration in the field of design.

George Yarrow, the internationally renowned master of automobile design, said: "The connotation of design is culture", and the revelation of Chinese traditional elements in the design vein to modern design should not only be reflected in the appearance of the design works, but also in the entire process of design, production, manufacturing, consumption and experience should feel the presence of Chinese traditional culture, and this process requires a lot of time and effort. The whole process of design, production, manufacturing, consumption and experience should feel the existence of traditional Chinese culture, and this process requires the accumulation of experience, and a deep understanding of traditional culture, as well as a thorough understanding of the theme and a new and unique perspective of thinking.

The borrowing and application of traditional Chinese elements in the design vein is not to copy and paste them into the original form, but to deconstruct and re-combine and match them with the principles of modern composition. The re-knowledge and re-understanding of the traditional elements and things can bring about a new way of thinking, which can in turn improve the design thinking and creativity of the modern designers. We are convinced that contemporary designers who grew up in China's deep cultural heritage, as long as the design holds the advantageous genes in Chinese wisdom and ability, with a deep understanding of national culture, in the near future, China's design will stand on the top of the world.