Research On The Images Of The Twelve Ancient Chinese Zodiac Animal

The culture of the Chinese zodiac is one of the components of Chinese traditional culture.It is a group of image clues that run through China’s early animal worship and China’s local religions.It even affected the development of foreign religious culture in the Sui and Tang Dynasties.The culture and images of the Chinese Zodiac have spread so far and are constantly affecting China’s cultural life.This research adopts image textual research to make textual research on the origin,evolution and graphic culture of the images of the Chinese zodiac.The Chinese Zodiac first took the "Twelve birds" as its embryonic form.At present,the zodiac images first appeared in the late Qin and early Han Dynasties.After the washing of Taoist culture by the Confucianism advocated by Dongzhongshu in the Western Han Dynasty,the concept of "Zodiac" appeared in the public’s field of vision in the Eastern Han Dynasty.The article supplements the pottery figurines of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals with animal heads and human bodies in the Northern Dynasty,which are exhibited in overseas museums,so as to prove that the image of the Chinese Zodiac was not simply a realistic animal image at the beginning.At the early stage,the zodiac images appeared by the integration of Buddhism and Taoism.Their shape evolution reflected the development process of people’s philosophical thoughts,political thoughts,social changes and cultural beliefs in the development of Chinese history,and brought cultural connotations to future generations in terms of age,calendar,faith,marriage,medical treatment,agricultural time,etc.The twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac are respectively endowed with auspicious symbolic meanings,which adds cultural thickness to the contemporary Chinese Zodiac design and puts forward the design orientation of taking quality as beauty.