A culture of color

A culture of color

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 Chongqing 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.

According to designers for the school, Chinese colors are the precipitation and quintessence of Chinese culture, as well as the best educational resource for cultivating aesthetic qualities and cultural self-confidence.

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.