The Modern Design ldea and the New Paper-cut Art
11 min readBecause modern art movement has developed prosperously, there appeared many kinds of art genres. In turn, these special modern art formspowerfully stimulate the growth and development of modern art design, and the modern design idea has become a good creative chain for the new visual language demands arising from the new era. Let us look at the extraordinary effect on modern design brought by many artistic genres and thoughts, and the associated significance between modern design and new paper-cut art.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Marcel Duchamp are representatives of the Futurism art movement, and their creation emphasizes the fourth dimension space-time and the beauty of science and technology’s applicationin works of art. Under its influence, the modern design idea shows a visual effect of liberalization and freedom, and traditional and stiff space design is battered by it. Futurism has similarities with Dadaism, which emphasizes anti-rationalism and anti-legitimism.
It advocates the effect of opportunity and occasionality. In the modern design, the biggest effect of Dadaism is using the unorganized collage combination technique to design art works, making the artistic works have a strange, weird, unique visual effect. It makes a revolutionary breakthrough fortraditional design principles, and thenlays the foundation for the generation of Surrealism. The surrealistic art is a kind of anti-aesthetic artistic genre above the “realism”. Italian Giorgio de Chirico and Spanish Salvador Dali are itsrepresentatives. The surrealistic painting is the art of using realistic technique to express subconscious and dream-like absurd sight. This expression of modern art influences the modern design art deeply, mainly in the field of ideology and spirit, and it has an important simulative effect to latter design on the enlightening aspects of concept and creativity. Cubism painting art tries to express the artistic features of analytic target to rebuild objects and comprehensive processing object and it emphasizes a kind of “real performance”with rational law.
Meanwhile, Cubism provides the positive practical basis for Dutch De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, particularly the birth and development of the Bauhaus design system. Cubism has a profound influence on De Stijl and Constructivism; especially they get promoted in the Bauhaus school of design in Germany. This artistic ideology is applied to the graphic design, architectural design, font design and other modern design field, creating a new world of art design. Russian constructivism design movement, from the point of style feature, is a combination of Cubism oand Futurism, which uses the lively, dynamic combinations in modern graphic design and considers “form is content”, fundamentally changes the artistic principle of “content determines form”. El Lissitzky is the master in design ofConstructivism. His influence on graphic design style of Constructivism is the greatest, simple and clear, and he is not engaged in the decoration in the graphic design, but for him, the creation is just to carry out rational structure adjustment and the layout processing. The structure of Russian Constructivism finally becomes the service object of modern visual communication, and form eventually gives way to the function. Dutch De Stijl movement is one of the important modern design movements which keeps pace with Russian Constructivism. The artistic design thought and form are originated from the exploration of Piet Mondrian’s paintings. The direct factors on the “style”of Mondrian is the introduction of Cubism factors in his paintings, and he gradually puts his paintings evolved into the vertical and horizontal geometry characteristic of purely abstract and highly simplicity. Here, the rationalization degree reaches the highest point, forms the very distinctive design features, and achieves a high degree of visual communication effect. The exploration of pure designof Constructivism and De Stijl gets a direct benefit from Cubist painting, and it has a huge and potential influence on the artistic design in the future. The Bauhaus Design School in early twentieth century is produced under the direct effects of these two movements. The”Bauhaus”combines Russian Constructivism and Dutch De Stijl with German Modernism design movement, and it emphasizes the unity of technique, logic and artistry. The exploration and experiment of design tend to be theoretical, systematic, creating a new situation in the design field. Nomatter Constructivism or De Stijl, no matter El Lissitzky or Mondrian, the structure of the pure line, the pursuit of balance and rationality and the attention of the social function of the design have an almost decisive influence on the internationalism design style after the Second World War, which points out the direction for the design direction and the formation of design idea in new era. During the modernism art movement, there also appeared a new graphic design movement centered on poster, which known as “the Pictorial Modernism”. The effect of modernism art of “post-Cubism painting”in graphic design, has the positive sense of times. The art form directly faces the modernization and mechanical industry, adopts the exploring and meaningful practice, uses a new decoration motive, pursues a kind of decoration aesthetics with mechanical sense, and breaks the previous opposite situation of”decorative art” and modernism. The graphic design “the Pictorial Modernism”deeply influenced by Cubism and other modernism arts become an important force on the history of graphic design with its unique and fresh design style, and it plays an invaluable role in thegraphic design of the concept of image expression and the development ofAmerican modern poster design and illustration art.
The horn of the world modern art has been blown more than one century, and it brings an indelible imprint to the human modern life, modern civilization and modernistic design. As everyone knows, modern design brings the brilliant light to the human visual art stage and real social life scenes with a new visual angle. Because of this, the new paper-cut art as the carrier of modern visual art, uses the scientific achievements of modern design for reference, actively introduces modern design idea, and has made the innovation and the development of considerable significance in its design concept and creative method.
With the two sides of influence on the social life which constantly brought by the modern industrial civilization，people begin to rethink some problems in design of modern new reflection and positively explore some problems of the modernistic design.The ideal of the post-modernist design arises at the historic moment.Post-modernistic design pays attention to traditional quality，emphasizes the natural breath and humanistic spirit，and pursues human common cultural win-win atmosphere as the fashion idea of design.In today’s society，globalization，nationality and creative thinking become a mainstream trend of design idea.The thinking and concept of contemporary art design become the unique”self-care”to the contemporary artists，and express the fresh and philosophical visual art language to the world.
As everyone knows，like the modern design idea，the mind withrich emotion，human consciousness and care for nature is also a good mind theme for Chinese paper-cut art to chant and sing.The national spirit and aesthetic ideas with natural6 and quiet，rural and romantic feelings created by the space atmosphere which consists of massive and symbolic animal and plant imagesare the unique beauty of Chinese paper-cut.Chinese paper-cut art follows Chinese traditional creation thought and traditional design concept consciously orunconsciously，provides a good development platform for the new paper-cut art.“Gentle”embodiesthe unity of form and content，function and decoration, and this is the essence of traditional design concept. Its artistic spirit reflects the key problem in the design relationship between decoration and function.”If the support and reliance get lost, then the main body will disappear”, and the form is very important in the traditional design. This is humanized thing. The cognition of various factions of the relationship between zhi which refers to essence, and wen which refers to literary grace is different.”Gentle”is the mainstream concept consistent with various aspects, and it becomesthe outstanding thoughts of Chinese traditional creation process. On this point, the new paper-cut art avoids its weaknesses, breaks through traditional paper-cut’s simple patternlanguage and flat visual form, reframes modern visual value of paper-cut, realizes the effective unity of function and decorates with more modern aesthetics. Chinese ancient creation concept emphasizes”yi”which means property, while Ming Dynasty Ji Cheng’s”The Craft of Gardenings”expressed gardens”jing zai ti yi”which means the essence lies on the appropriate body, embroidery”yi qi suo yi”which means it should be done in the proper place, and ceramic”ge sui qi yi”which means it should be done according to the actual condition.”Yi”refers to harmonyand adaptation, in addition, the ancient science books Artificers’ Record tells us:”Actual conditions should be identified carefully in order to examine the tools and materials…”Creation design should not only observe the material, but also make corresponding shape and decoration according to actual situation. The idea of “yin cai shi yi”(which means the fact that teachers should teach students according to their aptitudes) runs from beginning toend throughout the Chinese traditional creation thoughts, so as to determine the aesthetic values of creation.I think modeling based on material is one of the important developed ideas of innovation and exploration of new art, and harmony and adaptation become the important design principles for modern visual design. It also sets up a good new space of modern visual specification and creative design for new paper-cut art. Chinese Taoism emphasizes the philosophy of “unity of man and nature”and the harmony of human, society and nature. Chinese traditional design has been widely inspired by nature, which determines that it advocates the primitive natural style. As Ming Dynasty ornamentalist Huang Dacheng recorded in his Notes on Lacquer Decoration:”The essence of making thing is that the quality should be perfect like human’ sphysical body while the article should be obiective and balanced like Yin and Yang”, which clarifies the relationship between creation and life, oalso it explains the harmonious rule of creation and form. The “creation”should be not only nature but also based on materials. The new paper-cut art combined with the new design concept, with the inheritance and development of traditional design concept of creation, emphasizes the unity of the traditional humanistic spirit and sense of fashion in the modeling.
Chinese enjoyable spirit can be used very well here. In the topic of creation.
It could take many symbolic visual languages, and make a natural artistic effect to us.
The design rule of modern graphic design also has a very good application value for the innovation of new art forms with its unique abstract and rational concept. Through the understanding of modern graphic design language, the new paper-cut art pursues artistic style, trying to use the eastern and western visual art language with relative difference in an artistic atmosphere of unity to explore a new way of visual art, which has practical significance of internationalization. In a sense, this is pure artistic mentality to take the connection mode of comparison, strengthen the visual graphic art effect, fully display the visibility design of theme and the language of graphic design, further strengthen the graphic integration and decoration, and constitute a span-new beauty of artistic form of new paper-cut. The unique spirit of Chinese paper-cut art shows tactful imagination, wonderful coincidence with disharmony, exaggerated distorted image features, contradictory space… This is very consistent with the modern visual art characteristic. In the new paper-cut art activities, it tries to bring the new design thinking ideas organically into the work and reach the design effectof pattern recognition. For example,a graphic image with symbolic orderedpermutation and combination, graphic with consciously exaggerated contrast, many contradictory things(that is originally incompatible things) withopposite and unified contact, planar graphic image and stereoscopic graph together in the picture and so on. This design way of thinking is actively used, and the communication between some modern and traditional visual effect willhave a positive effect on the exploration and innovation of the new paper-cutart. Japanese designer Fukuda Shigeo combines graphic design with art works of three-dimensional modeling.
It is essentially something with plane vision language, skillfully using three dimensional and spatial modeling factors(such as light effects) to express images and achieve the artistic effect of visibility. It is not difficult to see the valuable spirit of exploration and the thoughts of his artistic development from his works; at the same time, it also makes us realize the vast creative thinking in the field of new paper-cut art, and review of future design art.”Cups”and other daily necessities are designed by anti-conventional graphical processing whichbreaks the normal vision habit and lets people see and understand from a new design view enjoying a kind of beauty.
The environmental sculpture art works ofMr. Fukuda is with a more artistic taste.
We can see their work as “two sides face”(self note) sculpture, and one of the most characteristic works is “Piano and Seurat”. We can see the classical pianoimage from one side of the work; but from another side, what catches our eye is the characters in Seurat’s representative works. In addition, the more notable things in these art works is that Fukuda skillfully combines his works with space, material and light effect and creates many artistic design works with wonderful idea and strong practical value. The sunflower image of “Kyushu Bridge Pavement”, the modeling in the environmental space have elongated, created a normal visualeffect by illusion. Mr. Fukuda’s tactfulpeculiar design thinking is the strong power of continuous development. As he said,”I want to produce a feeling of surprise and shock for people who saw my works”. Skillful penetration of material, technology, space, lighting effect and other design factors adds survival charm for new paper-cut art, actively combines with modern technology, carries forward the fashion spirit, and vigorously develops new cultural and creative industries from the source of paper-cut. The famous designer Mr. Lv Jingren has repeatedly indicated the direction for my new paper-cut art that we should develop new design product with the development from plane to three-dimensional, space, dynamic and other broad direction from the source of paper-cut art, and carry out its new product of culture design andthe art works of socialization as soon as possible.
In short, we should inherit the spirit of traditional culture, fuse the contemporary design concepts, and develop new ideasof paper cut art. The development road of new paper-cut is wide; at the same time, new paper-cut art will create new ideas of modern design art by virtue of the new media and technology. The art form with new national spirit and style will continuously induce wide associative space and creativity, and build a goodcreative platform for the development of modern art design. We should understand the modern art design fromthe point of national uniqueness, just as Mr. Zhang Daoyi’s important cultural and artistic point of view of “angle conversion”, the so-called “personality”.
It is an outstanding performance of national design. It is not an easy thing to explore art and apply art from the height of nation. If you want to come up with a little feature, it will be more difficult. Because it is not easy, we should be bold to innovate and search it, and this will be more meaningful.
