(China Daily) When it comes to color, our first reaction is mostly the seven-tone spectrum of the rainbow. Color has a particularly important and prominent role in China in both the language and aesthetics. Some rarely used Chinese characters are assigned a specific color, and these figurative prototypes have developed into poetic images with the changing of the times.Incorporating Chinese colors and their cultural essence into the campus is what educators at Yunjin Primary School in Southwest China's Chongqi municipality believe a first step toward reviving the traditional aesthetic consciousness-using Chinese colors and patterns to ingeniously design their school logo and build up cultural meaning.
The school has designated "wisdom purple", a specially designed shade of the module selected from Yun brocade, a traditional silk technique that boasts a nuance of 27 colors. Banners and logos based on the color are seen everywhere on campus, and even the school public WeChat account and PowerPoint templates take advantage of these symbols to strengthen the sense of belonging among faculty and students.
Wu Min, associate of the project at Dett Design based in Chongqing, says these colors are the precipitation and quintessence of Chinese culture, as well as the best educational resource for cultivating aesthetic qualities and cultural self-confidence.
"For example, xiang lu zi yan, translated literally into English as incense burner purple smoke, would lose most of its poetic conjecture in the translation," Wu says.
"But if a child is brought up in a Chinese context, they would know perfectly well that the four-word abbreviation comes from a famous quote, 'In sunshine censer peak breathes purple vapor'. Here the purple color is cleverly used with poetic words to 'speak' the concrete and 'paint' an image," Wu says.
In a Japanese elementary school not far from Odaiba, Tokyo, traditional colors and allusions are used to decorate the corridor walls. "Amur cork tree", "golden tea", "Edo purple"-each wall presents elegant traditional colors in turn, supplemented by fonts to introduce their origins.
"How can children not cherish and love the traditional colors and aesthetic traditions of their country?" says scholar Guo Hao after a visit to the school. Guo also wrote the book Traditional Chinese Colors.
Recently more attention has been given to the topic partly as a result of the increasing popularity of Chinese costume dramas. Whether it's the smashing TV series The Story of Yanxi Palace, or the historical costumes presented in the series The Longest Day in Chang'an that restored the standard color cards of the Tang Dynasty, all these authentic renderings have taken the audience by storm and aroused in them a yearning for Chinese classical colors.
Recently more attention has been given to the topic partly as a result of the increasing popularity of Chinese costume dramas. Whether it's the smashing TV series The Story of Yanxi Palace, or the historical costumes presented in the series The Longest Day in Chang'an that restored the standard color cards of the Tang Dynasty, all these authentic renderings have taken the audience by storm and aroused in them a yearning for Chinese classical colors.Low saturation color systems are featured and the restrained color matching, subdued and somber, consists mainly of muted whites and grays, complemented by beige, cream, almond and grayish blue. Many netizens claim that the color palette of The Story of Yanxi Palace strikes a remarkable resemblance to colors used by Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. The colors exude understated vintage quality.
"The color number on the Pantone color card defines the trend of international fashion and has become a popular symbol sought after by trendy people and the general public," says Wu Qing, a designer at the China Fashion & Color Association.
"It seems that Chinese colors have not yet lived up to their unique charm in the fashion industry. Those ancient Chinese colors with elegant names and charms have been lost for a long time in the piles of old paper and the long river of history. Fortunately, these dramas are encouraging signs of an artistic revival."
At the beginning of the year, the Cultural and Creative Center of China Academy of Art released the 2021 Chinese color power lychee red (gei li hong). Inspired by the red color of lychee, the team also use the homophonic pun (li stands for power and also lychee in different intonations) to convey the wishes of the Chinese people to overcome the epidemic-gei li (powerful) in all aspects.
At the beginning of the year, the Cultural and Creative Center of China Academy of Art released the 2021 Chinese color power lychee red (gei li hong). Inspired by the red color of lychee, the team also use the homophonic pun (li stands for power and also lychee in different intonations) to convey the wishes of the Chinese people to overcome the epidemic-gei li (powerful) in all aspects.After completing the preliminary research work, the design team extracted hundreds of lychee-related colors. After repeated debugging and screening, dozens of colors with the highest frequency were determined. The team led by two experts Song Jianming and Wu Bibo, selected them again. Combining the classical names of lychee and red in traditional Chinese culture, the final version was named after dan xia, xi lan, yu he and luo shen-four different levels of red genealogy as the standard color of this project. The theme color is permeated with the vigorous oriental aesthetics.
"In the Tang Dynasty, gei li hong is the bright and beautiful color on the clothes of the envoys from the western regions, and in the landscape painting Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, the reddish color is the forest of maple leaves in the mountains," says Song Jianming, director of the Color Research Institute of China Academy of Art.
"Nowadays, the color is fashionable, which is more in line with the wishes of young people, so we choose it as the future fashion trend."
Despite the fact that the Chinese aesthetic has been eclipsed for a long time, scholar Guo Hao and designer Li Jianming are among the many who are willing to dig deep into this treasure trove.
The duo have reviewed nearly 400 color-related literature and classics, conducted an unprecedented textual research and summed up 384 traditional Chinese color names.
Different from the three-primary-color classification method in the West, the Zhou Dynasty (c. 11th century-256 BC) ruled its world with rituals and stipulated that the traditional Chinese five colors "red, yellow, blue, black and white" were the positive hues.
Guo divides the words used by the ancients to describe colors into two categories: concrete and imagery. Concrete is the color of words that come from the heavens and the earth. For example, brown comes from vivid concrete figures: golden tea, autumn tea, sauce tea, agarwood, eagle back, brick, lotus root silk, tea green, sandalwood, and so on. The imagery words are based on everything superimposed on the way humans perceive and record the world, derived from human activities, emotions and imagination.
During the 2020 Chinese Traditional Color Academic Annual Conference in November 2020, Feng Shi, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology, says exploring the oriental color system is a subject of great academic significance. It is the embodiment of traditional Chinese epistemology and philosophy. He called on scholars to set up a color system with Chinese characteristics.
"The Chinese traditional colors are the way the Chinese define colors and the way the Chinese look at the world. There is an oriental aesthetic and ancient wisdom that has been passed down for thousands of years," Guo says.
Source: By Zhang Lei | China Daily | Updated: 2021-09-04 09:58