The Humanism Of Chinese Ancient Design

It’s well known that the ancient Chinese people living in the natural economic society created a remarkable, brilliant agricultural and handicraft civilization. In that era, the production activities are accompanied with people’s primitive beliefs, witchcraft activities and aesthetic activities in many events which made the practical and aesthetic human creative activities last a long time in human civilization. However, as the quick development and evolution of modern science and technology, aesthetic human spirits are abandoned with the out-of-date witchcrafts and beliefs in primitive production. The high-level development of modern science and technology endowed human with great capability to utilize, remark and conquer nature. Meanwhile, the evil in humanity are somehow awakened which caused materialistic, supremacy of money, anomic, values collapse becomes more and more popular, human nature is severely depressed and distorted, people become narrow, selfish, cruel, obstinate, routine and boring. Now the world is full of towering iron and steel, cement forest, mountains and plains are shrink by the outstretched city, nature is seriously polluted, beautiful environment is destroyed by human being’s activities. The destruction of nature and mother earth equals the trampling of beauty and humanity itself. Unlimited expectation of high-tech and high efficiency in modern production is becoming the shackles for mental and physical pleasure. Therefore, combination of technology and art, unification of science and humanity are brought up again. Technical aesthetics, scientific humanity is a critique for technical rationality as well as a return of human nature. In case design lack of human spirit, repudiation of philosophy, human’s exploration on colorful life and the spiritual world will be eliminated, especially the opposition of ultimate existence of the world and life and values pursuit will be stopped which ignores the spiritual needs of people as a kinds of social existence. Propagation of humanities spiritual civilization in a certain sense, can be deemed as the essence of human, is the eternal theme of human spiritual construction, is the lighthouse to guide the development of human thoughts and culture.However, it’s very difficult to pursue humanistic emotional care during the development of high-tech science and rationality. Maybe the successful combination of technical practice in Chinese ancient artifact art activities and human emotions can bring us some inspiration.In this paper, the concept of artistic creation and human spirit is discussed together with nation’s cultural tradition, by so to explore the humanistic spirit deeply hidden in the artistic creation, to find out the profound cultural background and spiritual factors behind the nation’s arts, to get a more insight understanding about the characteristics of artistic creation and the formation of artistic style in the deep national cultural background.This paper is discussed and expounded from four aspects to study their individual influence on ancient artifact design, which are etiquette culture, human beliefs, human rationality, science and technical humanity. The study shows hidden ceremony in works is the humanity environment of the artifact art, multi-faith is the internal driving force of artifact art variety, harmony of emotion and rationality is the aesthetic consideration of artifact art, conform and utilization of nature is the optimistic combination of creation technology and humanity.In this paper, the discussion strictly follows the red line, which is requirement functionality-aesthetic-humanity. It’s proved by the creation of hundred thousands years that human needs are continuously developed which drives human to create new inventions to meet theirselves unlimited needs. The pursuit of perfection and continuous improvement is the driving force of creation arts development. No matter how developed human spirits, they can never replace the material needs which is the actual first needs, its subordinate position in creation arts has no doubt. A variety of concepts beyond the functionality itself are included when people produce or use kinds of goods, e.g. ritual, faith, rationality, science and technology, which make them like the trunk and branches of a tree to support and nourish each other therefore to form the colorful humanistic spiritual world in ancient creation activities.