Chinese traditional culture is rich in connotation, which is also an outstanding result of our country’s cultural accumulation in the process of development. Traditional Chinese culture can be divided into "secular culture" and "elegant culture". For example, the "four treasures of the study" - pen, ink, paper and inkstone, known as the fragrance of calligraphy and ink, are exquisite products in the elegant culture. In the eyes of ancient literati, exquisite study utensils including pens, inks, paper and inkstones were not only tools for writing poems and paintings, but also spiritual companions for them to guide the country, appreciate people, inspire writing, and lead the fashion of the times.
As shown in the picture is the layout of an ancient study room. With the popularization of aesthetics in daily life, this elegant culture has gradually been re-integrated into people's lives, reflected in consumers' demands for clothing, food, housing, transportation, etc. In pursuit of higher quality and connotation for daily needs, in the end, cultural and creative products stand out among many products relying on the culture contained in them, and are not only sought after by tourists, but also loved by ordinary consumers. These cultural and creative products based on Chinese traditional culture have also become a carrier to communicate tradition and modernity, and to maintain appearance and connotation.
Cultural and creative products must achieve accurate expression and communication of cultural content, so that consumers can receive accurate cultural content and gain cultural experience through cultural and creative products. This is a basic requirement for designing cultural and creative products.
What is culture?
Before using various cultural elements to design cultural and creative products, we also need to understand the concept of culture. "Consider humanities to transform the world." This sentence comes from the "Book of Changes", which means to condense values, melt people's hearts, and cultivate behaviors in different eras. "Observe humanities and transform them into the world" emphasizes the transformation of culture, from which the word "culture" comes.
Liang Shuming, a master of Chinese studies, defined culture as: The so-called culture is nothing but various aspects of a nation’s life. Culture can be summarized into three aspects: spiritual life, such as religion, philosophy, art, etc.; social life, such as social organizations, ethical habits, political systems, economic relations, etc.; material life, such as diet and daily life, etc.
There are many explanations about culture. If you want to explain culture clearly, it is very difficult to find an accurate answer from more than 200 interpretations of culture. It is like grabbing the air with bare hands. Therefore, in this book we understand culture this way: Culture is a spiritual value and lifestyle that becomes a habit, and its final result is a collective personality.
So, cultural content is everywhere in our daily lives, and cultural and creative products allow consumers to experience culture and feel different cultural contents and cultural elements during the use of daily necessities.
Cultural classification.
There are many categories of culture, and there are different results according to different classification standards.
(1) The first classification method: divided into elegant culture and popular culture
Chengxintang paper is an extremely precious rice paper product in ancient China, and its production technology is very Be particular about it. Chengxintang paper, produced under the personal supervision of Li Yu, the later master of the Southern Tang Dynasty, is a treasure among rice papers. It has "skin like an egg membrane, as firm and clean as jade, thin and smooth, and is the best at that time." From the Southern Tang Dynasty to the Northern Song Dynasty, it has been recognized as a rice paper. The best paper. Chengxintang paper, used for calligraphy and painting creation, undoubtedly represents a kind of elegant culture.
When rice paper, the carrier of paper-cutting, turned red, its manufacturing process became less complicated and became very folk-custom, becoming the culture in people's lives, that is, popular culture. It is indispensable to use it to cut window grilles during holidays, and it is necessary to use it to cut happy words during weddings, as shown in the picture.
(2) The second classification method: divided into material culture and intangible culture
According to the definition of tangible cultural heritage in the United Nations Convention for the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, Those belonging to one of the following categories can be listed as cultural heritage.
①Cultural relics. Buildings, sculptures and paintings of outstanding and universal value from a historical, artistic or scientific point of view, compositions or structures of archaeological significance, inscriptions, caves, settlements and complexes of cultural relics of all kinds.
②Building complex. A group of individual or interconnected buildings that have outstanding, universal value from a historical, artistic or scientific point of view because of their architectural form, identity and their place in the landscape.
③Ruins. Areas of man-made works or unique masterpieces of man and nature and archaeological sites of outstanding and universal value from a historical, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological perspective.
Based on this, the Sun Bird gold ornaments now stored in the Jinsha Heritage Museum in Chengdu, Sichuan Province are cultural relics and belong to material cultural heritage.
The Sun Bird Gold Ornament is a piece of gold foil unearthed from the Jinsha Site in Chengdu, Sichuan in 2001. It is a work of the late Shang Dynasty. The entire gold ornament is in the shape of a ring with complex hollow patterns and is divided into two layers: inner and outer. The inner layer is equidistantly distributed with 12 rotating tooth-like rays of light; the outer layer pattern surrounds the inner layer pattern and is composed of 4 identical birds flying counterclockwise, as shown in the picture.
Among the ancient buildings, the most well-known is the Forbidden City in Beijing. It is the royal palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties in China. It was formerly known as the "Forbidden City". It is located in the center of the central axis of Beijing and is an ancient Chinese palace building. The essence of it. There are also Suzhou classical gardens, known as the "Jiangnan", whose history can be traced back to the gardens of King Wu during the Spring and Autumn Period in the 6th century BC. Suzhou has a large number of classical gardens. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were more than 170 in and around the city. It is a model of gardens in the south of China. Both belong to the architectural complex and also belong to the material culture.
In Chinese history, there are many exciting man-made projects, not only the Great Wall used for military defense, but also Dujiangyan as shown in Figure 4, which are all very important projects. material culture. Decades before Qin Shihuang ordered the construction of the Great Wall, a remarkable project - Dujiangyan - had been completed on the Sichuan Plain. It is characterized by its long history and no dam to divert water, making it the originator of the world's water conservancy culture.
During the Warring States Period, people living along the Min River were troubled by floods every year. After the completion of Dujiangyan, floods no longer occurred, and the irrigation system made Sichuan the most productive agricultural region in China. Its scale is far less grand than the Great Wall on the surface, but it has benefited the local people for thousands of years.
According to the "Intangible Cultural Heritage Law of the People's Republic of China": Intangible cultural heritage refers to various traditional cultural expressions that are passed down from generation to generation by people of all ethnic groups and regarded as part of their cultural heritage. , as well as physical objects and places associated with traditional cultural expressions. Including:
①Traditional oral literature and the language as its carrier.
②Traditional art, calligraphy, music, dance, drama, folk arts and acrobatics.
③Traditional skills, medicine and calendar.
④ Traditional etiquette, festivals and other folk customs.
⑤Traditional sports and entertainment.
⑥Other intangible cultural heritage.
Based on the above content, Chinese mythology, calligraphy, oracle bone inscriptions, Kun Opera, the twenty-four solar terms, and different folk customs from various places are all intangible culture, as shown in the figure.
(3) The third classification method: divided into artifact culture, behavioral culture and conceptual culture
The so-called artifact culture refers to the culture at the material level, which is the material life materials of people. The cultural content created during the production process includes aspects such as food, clothing, housing and transportation. Such as the traditional costumes of the Han nationality (hereinafter referred to as Hanfu) and the traditional Chinese plucked string instrument-guqin with a history of more than 3,000 years, as shown in the picture.
The so-called behavioral culture refers to the culture at the institutional level, which is reflected in various social relationships between people and people’s lifestyles, such as various customs in traditional festivals: staying up late during the New Year , post Spring Festival couplets; hang calamus and eat rice dumplings during the Dragon Boat Festival; appreciate the moon and eat moon cakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival, etc. For example, on the Double Ninth Festival, there are scenes of eating Double Ninth cake, drinking chrysanthemum tea, and making dogwood sachets; displayed in the shop window are mooncake molds used to make mooncakes that have appeared in the Song Dynasty.
Conceptual culture refers to spiritual culture, centered on values ??or cultural value systems, including theoretical concepts, cultural ideals, literature and art, ethics and morals, etc. As shown in Figure 11, it is an ancestral hall located in Hongcun, Anhui. As a building, the ancestral hall itself is a cultural relic, but it carries a lot of historical, humanistic and folklore information, so it also contains conceptual culture.
On the walls of many ancestral halls there are often plaques with contents such as "Family Instructions", "Clan Rules" and "Family Laws", which contain traditional Chinese ethics with "loyalty, trust, filial piety" as the core. Apart from the dross, there are also many traditional virtues of the Chinese nation, such as respecting elders, being filial to parents, being friends with brothers, respecting teachers, etc.
(4) The fourth classification method: divided into food culture, clothing culture, architectural culture, regional culture, etc.
①Food culture. Chinese food culture is extensive, profound, long-established, and highly distinctive.
First of all, there are various flavors. There has always been a saying in my country that "rice from the south is from the north", and the taste is divided into "sour in the east and spicy in the west, sweet in the south and salty in the north", which mainly include the four major flavors of Bashu, Qilu, Huaiyang, Guangdong and Fujian.
Chinese people, who have the concept that "food is the first priority for the people", will start a food faction dispute between the north and the south almost every holiday. During the Dragon Boat Festival, they argue whether to eat salty rice dumplings or sweet rice dumplings, meat rice dumplings or bean curd rice dumplings. . When eating mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival, people not only discuss whether to eat salty or sweet, but also discuss which is the king of mooncakes, the five-nut barbecued pork or the white lotus egg yolk. There are even differences in how to eat mooncakes. Southerners like to cut and eat mooncakes with a fork, while Northerners feel that this is too artificial and it is better to eat it whole. This confirms the diversity of Chinese food culture from another aspect. Shown in the picture are salted tofu pudding and Suzhou’s unique meat mooncakes.
Secondly, do not eat from time to time. The Chinese are good at matching food according to seasonal changes, which are so-called seasonal dishes. These dishes silently remind people of the way to live in balance with all things.
In addition, Chinese food culture also pays attention to the matching and harmony of ingredients and tableware; they also like to give food some poetic names, such as "Fengwei", "Ants climbing the tree", "Lion" "Head", "Beggars Chicken", etc.
On the surface, Chinese people pay attention to eating, but they pay more attention to the philosophy of knowing and understanding things contained in the form. For example, on the 100th anniversary of a baby's birth, red eggs are given to relatives and friends to express blessings. The "egg" represents the continuation of life.
② Clothing culture. Clothing, food, housing and transportation are the four most important things in daily life. Clothing ranks first, and the most representative Chinese traditional clothing culture is Hanfu. China has great etiquette, so it is called Xia; it has the beauty of uniforms, so it is called Hua. What we call "Chinese" has such a meaning, so Hanfu is also called Huafu, which is generally in the form of "upper garments and lower garments".
The reason for this is mainly determined by the attributes of the Chinese nation as a farming nation. When farmers are tired and sweaty from working in the fields, they can easily take off their upper clothes. It is also one of the differences between farming peoples and nomadic peoples. Of course, with the development of society, the upper and lower conjoined Hanfu also appeared. However, for ordinary farmers, the clothing is still mainly in the form of "top and lower clothes".
In addition to the formal characteristics, the patterns on Hanfu also directly reflect people's ideas. Different eras, forms and patterns have simultaneously formed the Chinese traditional clothing culture of a specific era.
The Zhou Dynasty implemented a feudal system, followed Zhou rituals, and clothing also followed a strict hierarchy. The pattern used on clothing is the "Twelve Chapter Patterns". The emperor's large fur crown can be printed with all the seal patterns, including 9 types of duke's seals, 7 types of marquis' seals, etc. The patterns are not only for decoration, but also constitute the "Twelve Chapter Patterns" of the sun, moon, stars, mountains, dragons, Chinese insects, Zongyi, algae, fire, pink rice, 黼, and 黻.
Each coat of arms corresponds to a virtue, "sun" corresponds to "light", "moon" corresponds to "tranquility", "stars" corresponds to "kosen", and "mountain" corresponds to "Stable", "dragon" corresponds to "flexibility", "Hua Chong" corresponds to "gorgeous", "Zong Yi" corresponds to "loyalty and filial piety", "algae" corresponds to "clean", and "fire" corresponds to "upward" , "fenmi" corresponds to "serving the foundation", "黼" corresponds to "decisiveness", and "黻" corresponds to "clear reason".
Hanfu developed into the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and the style of clothing can be summarized as elegant, free and easy; in the Tang Dynasty, just like the poem "Clouds think of clothes, flowers think of face, spring breeze blows on the threshold, dew is rich", giving people a sense of richness and gorgeousness feeling; while Song Dynasty clothing is reserved and rigorous.
Strictly speaking, clothing includes two contents - clothes and accessories. The above contents mainly refer to clothes, while there are more types of accessories. "Clothes" and "ornaments" usually appear together. For example, the nobles of the Shang Dynasty had the habit of wearing jade ornaments. The rulers even formulated a complete system of wearing jade pendants to distinguish between classes and grades.
Guo Moruo once said: "Clothes are a symbol of culture, and clothes are the image of thoughts." After thousands of years of accumulation and integration, Chinese traditional clothing has been continuously enriched and developed, forming the Chinese clothing cultural system.
③Architectural culture. Chinese traditional architecture reflects the living style of the Chinese nation and has its own unique system and characteristics. It is known as the world's three major architectural systems alongside Western architecture and Islamic architecture.
The earliest prehistoric architecture in China was born at the turn of the Old and Neolithic Ages about 10,000 years ago. When primitive agriculture appeared, it appeared because of the requirement for settlement. In the long development history that followed, the idea of ??"harmony between man and nature" in traditional Chinese culture had an important impact on it.
The basic principles of traditional gardening proposed by Ji Cheng in the book "Yuan Ye": "The pavilions are high and bright, and the windows are empty neighbors; the vast ocean of thousands of hectares is received, and the splendor of the four seasons is harvested. The ground is covered with shady trees. , the locust trees are shaded in the courtyard; willows are planted along the embankment, plum blossoms are planted around the house, and the branches of the bamboo are planted; the Jinshan screen is lined with towering green trees, which are made by people, but they appear to be blooming from the sky. A state where architecture and nature are completely integrated. Take the flower window that is common in Suzhou gardens as an example. Ji Cheng calls it a leaky brick wall in his book. When the leaky brick wall is used in the garden, the wall will produce changes in reality and reality. The adjacent spaces on both sides seem to be separated but not separated, and the scenery is looming and full of layers, as shown in the figure.
Another example is Huizhou architecture, also known as Huizhou architecture, which is one of the most important schools of traditional Chinese architecture, as shown in the picture. In terms of site selection, villages are generally surrounded by mountains and rivers, and most of the residences face streets and alleys; in terms of the exterior shape of the building, the layers of horse-head walls are higher than the roof ridges, and some are higher in the middle and lower at the two ends. The black and white are clear, which outlines the appearance of the walls of the houses. The contour lines of the sky increase the layering and rhythmic beauty of the space.
④Regional culture. Whether it is the dispute between the north and the south over mooncakes, or the comparison between Suzhou gardens and Huizhou ancient villages, they are all related to an important classification in traditional Chinese culture, that is, regional culture. Regional culture is a unique culture formed after the culture is integrated with the environment in a certain regional environment.
The most representative culture is dialect. Dialect is the language and culture created by the land and water of a place, so through dialect we can understand different regional cultures and folklore phenomena.
In the Jinnan area of ??Shanxi Province, the bride cannot walk directly on the ground when she enters the door. She must walk on the red cloth bag spread on the ground that is passed from front to back. ”, which means “carrying on the family line”.
Folk beliefs also vary in different regions. Mazu is a folk belief spread in coastal areas of China. Mazu culture began in the Song Dynasty, developed in the Yuan Dynasty, flourished in the Ming Dynasty, flourished in the Qing Dynasty, and flourished in modern times. Before going to sea, people must worship Mazu and enshrine the goddess Mazu on the ship to pray for smooth winds and safety. Folk beliefs have local characteristics, and they no longer have meaning if they leave this place.
Embroidery, an ancient Chinese handicraft art, has also become a manifestation of regional cultural differences because it has been influenced by different regional cultures. Taking the Qinling Mountains and the Huaihe River as the dividing line between north and south, it is divided into Southern Embroidery and Northern Embroidery. Southern embroidery is dominated by the four famous embroideries of Suzhou embroidery, Hunan embroidery, Shu embroidery and Guangdong embroidery; Northern embroidery is dominated by local embroidery types such as Beijing embroidery, Shandong embroidery, Bian embroidery and Jin embroidery. Different regions breed different embroidery styles and form their own unique artistic characteristics, as shown in the picture.
The differences in regional culture prompt us to understand the local culture first when designing cultural and creative products with regional attributes. Only in this way can the design be recognized by consumers in this region and also be recognized by tourists. accept.
The content of traditional Chinese culture is so rich and colorful, providing us with a large number of cultural elements for creative design. However, only by continuously improving the designer's own cultural accomplishment can we accurately interpret them and express and convey them in an accurate way and with an appropriate carrier.