Chinese Traditional Folk Pattern and Modern Graphic Design

Abstract

Traditional Chinese folk graphics has been the rich cultural heritage of the nation, which provided a wealth of design elements for the modern graphic design. Modern graphic design blends with traditional Chinese folk patterns to give them new characteristics of the times, not only represents the traditional culture and innovation, but also indicates that China's graphic design is entering a new stage of development at the international level, to show the unique spirit of oriental culture. Any country and nation in the world form her unique custom during the long process of reproduction and development, as well as various folk art forms. These art forms are created by the working people directly, which are the valuable asset for generations. The art shows the emotion of love life and the pursuit of happiness. Until now, although the folk art has experienced rapid times change, it still remained the spectacular style. After the innovation by modern artists, it has reached a new height of development with new value in new era. 1. Chinese Traditional Folk Pattern Traditional Chinese folk pattern is an important part and expression of folk art, with profound connotation and spiritual essence for 5,000 years. The characters of it is, rich content, meaning and forms with long history. It implies on the auspicious and rhythm of life, not for the pursuit of the natural image, but for the visual symbols or graphics of traditional life. Traditional folk pattern played an important role of showing the folk ideological outlook, therefore, several of visual folk art style depends on the spirit and visual of transmission by folk patterns. 1.1 Spiritual meaning Folk graphic is linked to people subjective feeling with the results of historical accumulation. Chinese people always like to seek lucky by the means of art forms. As a result, the subject of folk graphic usually focus on "Blessing, Rich and Long life", "harmony" and "happiness and wealth" reflecting the eternal survival needs and the good wishes of avoiding disaster. Therefore, the traditional Chinese folk graphic can also be considered as keepsake of lucky and happiness, which makes role in people's subconsciousness. As a concept of visual symbols, folk graphic presents unique social and cultural phenomena in the sense of nation psychology. 1.2 Expression method The significances of traditional Chinese folk patterns are often full of meaning by idealized image to break the limitations of time and space. Different seasons and different places can also appear in the same pattern, not conveying the concept of the thing itself, but in the metaphor by the subjective ideas and aspirations. That is to say, folk patterns convey the ideas by the mean of pun, implying, symbol and metaphor, by dint of some image character and semantic homonym, for example, pairs of mandarin ducks means the love of spouse, and "fish" and "balance" has semantic homonym in Chinese pronunciation means happiness year by year. (Figure 1-2). 1.3 Expression content On the impact of Confucianism, Chinese people believed the harmony of god and human in the nature. Chinese peoples is the one of who created the patterns of landscapes, flowers and birds, therefore, the traditional Chinese folk patterns appeared in a large number of flowers, birds, insects, fish, animals and other natural things by empowering them to enrich various auspicious connotation, for example, dragon, phoenix and unicorn are the guardian of animals; Bamboo, peonies, carp and magpies are a symbol of wealth and safety (Figure 3-4). These above expression reflect the natural concept of harmony, as well as the taste intent of advocating natural aesthetic. In China's traditional concept, there is a aesthetic philosophy as "The truth is perfect, the beauty is real", and the meaning of "truth" here doesn't mean the visual, but the psychological truth. With the psychological demands, many brave persons, gods, auspicious dolls and lady figures were created to express the truth and beauty as the other expression content. (Figure 5-6). Not only because they have the ability of blessing common people, restraining evil,