The "Legend" of Chinese Character Visual Art in Chinese Graphic Design (4)

four. Relationship between "Six Meanings" of Chinese Characters and Modern Image Design Principles

Rudolph Arnheim believes that "the real creative thinking activities in the field of all human cognitive activities are carried out through the imagery." The Chinese people's thinking has obvious "imagery" thinking characteristics. Chinese characters, Chinese painting and calligraphy, and Chinese music are typical representatives. Later generations summarized the creation and use of Chinese characters as "Liu Yi." The homology of creative thinking methods has made Chinese characters and "visual communication activities in two-dimensional space" indissoluble. Here, I want to interpret the source of this “unresolved” through the visual communication of the principles of designing images in design. This makes us think about the relationship between Chinese characters and graphic design at the root of thinking.

Andre Leroy-Guyon believes that Chinese characters create a symbolic relationship between sounds and phonetic symbols (a group of intentions), which provides a great deal of room for Chinese poetry and calligraphy; Chinese characters are Human history represents a state of equilibrium. On the one hand, it expresses mathematical or biological concepts quite accurately. On the other hand, it retains the possibility of using the oldest verbal expression system. The juxtaposition of Chinese symbols does not create sentences. , but a group of meaningful images, the tension of the image is full of suggestive significance. [9] (P207-209) This feature of Chinese characters also makes it a great space for the visual communication of planes.

"The pictogram of Chinese characters is characterized by its simplification, generalization and concretization of the contours of objects. It is the result of long-term observation and observation by Chinese people on objects, elephants, and the reproduction of objects using symbolic images. The process of 'is not mirror-like, but it permeates the Chinese people's feelings and value judgments. The form and pictographic structure of Chinese characters already have representational factors that capture the main characteristics of things and reproduce them. It also reproduces the imagery of objects. At the same time, the artist's subjective aesthetic emotions are expressed. The simplification and generalization of object images does not deviate from `like` and `shape`, which creates a space for comprehension and imagination to exert a lot of tension..." [3] (P354)

The tool that enables us to grasp the source of the charm of the Chinese character is its formulating rules and the use of the wording. The wording used here refers to the latter two kinds of “six meanings” in Shuo Wen Jie Zi. Under the guise of "and" transcribing the six books that were spoken by the ancients, it is now generally believed that the first four are the word-making methods, and the latter two are using the wording, not the word-making method. The creation of Chinese characters is essentially a kind of "abstract abstract" thinking based on image thinking, because this kind of abstract thinking always revolves around the design activities of hieroglyphs and ideographs. Now I want to start from the principle of designing images in visual communication design, and discuss the creative image thinking contained in "Liu Yi".

1. The method of character creation in Chinese characters includes the general characteristics of imagery in designing images. DOLCN.com

The design image here refers to the visual result that we ultimately get in the graphic design, or a certain part of it. "Designing images" is a visual designer's intention to express his intentions, and to cause the concrete shape and posture of information exchange between people." The three main meanings of designing images are as follows: 1. Through visual channels. A specific, vivid image. 3. Visual symbols that can cause information exchange." [8] (P44) This feature of "concrete, vivid images" in the design image characteristics of modern Chinese characters (Lishu to current characters) Relative to the ancient Chinese characters (Chinese characters before the official book appeared) is weak, but compared with other languages ​​in the world today is the most obvious. The images contained in Chinese characters express a kind of observation and attitude of the Chinese nation to the natural world, human society, and the human spiritual world for thousands of years. Traces of culture in different eras are reflected in them.

The "morning" of Chinese characters is a word of understanding. The word "Chen" is written as "" and is the meaning of holding a stone knife. Together with the word “曰”, it depicts the scene where the sun breaks through the clouds and jumps out. In the word "kun", "Tu" represents land. The "Shen" originally meant that a woman gave birth to a girl, the girl regenerated after the girl grew up, and the continuation means from generation to generation. "Kun" is a rich land from the original meaning. "Kun" has the same meaning as "Land" and is an ancestor's worship of the earth and nature. This method of writing is actually a kind of image description of human psychology. It is also an image of the subject and object isomorphism and a positive and meaningful pictographic method. On the one hand, it is the manifestation of imagery, which has the ability to capture and store information; on the other hand, it allows the recipient to further process the image through vision and acquire images, thereby forming a certain concept (ie accumulating experience, understanding the world) and guiding social activities. .

2. The Chinese character-building method also embodies the design image feature of the “generality of the concept of things” (the generality of the concept is to capture the general essence from the image, and then break through the image and surpass the image).

In the course of the radical development of the Chinese character's radicals, the Chinese characters evolved from the graphic characters embodies the "conceptual overview of design images." Oracle and Jinwen have summed up relatively stable shapes in certain shapes of hieroglyphs, such as "day" and "month", but for certain words, such as "person" and "mountain" The words that refer to the relatively rich changes in the shape of things are often confusing and indeterminate in the writing system of ancient Chinese characters. Whether as a single word or as a radical, there are several ways of writing the same word. Take the example of "Japanese": Writing "" in Oracle "Dan", "" in "杲", "" in "是", and "" in """ in "是". Big.

That is, in the design and improvement of Chinese characters, the design features of "generalization of the concept of things" have been revealed. The word "mountain" was written from a wide variety of words to the current general writing method. Chinese characters grasped the intention of "mountain" and summarized the "images" of different forms of mountains as standing uprights above the plains and grasped them again. The concept of mountains is summarized as high and dangerous. "Respect, lofty," "junior, steep," "sacrifice, 巍峨", "嵩, 嵩 "."

3. Chinese characters are a reflection of the symbolic meaning of a design image. Because, as a special form of design image symbol, the Chinese character is the representative of artificial information in the human information dissemination, that is, "symbolic information". It is the conscious creation, absorption, and utilization of human beings that can cause people to relatively fixed thinking and reaction. Information forms. It consists of linguistic signs and non-linguistic signs. It strips off the nature of Chinese characters and it is almost a non-linguistic sign. Just as Susan Lange pointed out: The definition of symbols by the average person ignores the most important type of rational thinking that symbols have, or ignore the most important function of symbols - that is, the form of experience. In this form, experience is objectively presented for the important functions of people's observation, logic intuition, understanding, and understanding. Chinese characters have this function, so they can give a unique image to the various features of the subjective experience of attitudes, emotions, and emotions.

"Letters, written symbols of language, and conventions for the exchange of information between people are commonly used as visual signal systems. These symbols must be flexible in writing languages ​​composed of sounds, so that information can be sent to distant places and transmitted to future generations."[11] (P400 From the linguists' definition of painting and text, we were surprised to see a similar thinking process. When there is a fixed or tacit fixed connection between pictures, symbols and language forms, then they have completed the transition to writing, and Chinese characters have also experienced such a transition. Graphic design, graphic design, or thematic design often goes through a process similar to this one, except that the final result is not a simple text but a visual communication of multiple elements. Its ability to express is not only It is possible to "write" a language made up of sounds, and to be better able to express what "a language made up of sounds" cannot express. The creation of Chinese characters is a concrete method for Chinese people to incorporate their own feelings and concepts into the external world and to integrate their own emotional experiences and moral standards into the text. This kind of creativity and the result of creative thinking - Chinese characters, always reflects the Chinese people's cultural thoughts and national spirit.

(to be continued)