Xinjiang National Art Deco Aesthetic Psychology Retroactive

Based on "gold decoration culture" in the ethnic decorative art of Xinjiang, this paper attempts to discover historical, social and cultural origins of the aesthetic psychology for the ethnic decorative art. The paper is also structured around why the "gold decoration culture" has existed among ethnic groups in Xinjiang, and how its visual cultural characteristics were formed. Chapter1of the paper gives an account of the course of gold as a natural substance becoming a carrier of human culture and being given different cultural meanings by Eastern and Western nationalities. Chapter2gives an analysis from the visual perspective of the forms of the "gold decoration culture", and explores what ethnic cultural information that gold carries to ethnic groups in Xinjiang. Chapter3deals makes further discussion about the long tradition of the "gold decoration culture" from gold treating processes in Xinjiang’s gold and gold-decoration aesthetic tradition which emerged earlier than that in China’s central plains. Chapters4and5, through a theoretical analysis of the ethnic aesthetic psychology, looks into the "primitive code" for Xinjiang’s "gold decoration culture", starting from the natural and geographic environments in which the ethnic aesthetic psychology was formed, and from collective unconsciousness in its primitive culture. But it was in the social and cultural system that this ethnic aesthetic psychology deposited, and many characteristics of Xinjiang’s history and culture have been eventually stabilized through the aesthetic consciousness about gold and manifested in aesthetic perception of everyday life. In the final section, the paper looks at the influence that Xinjiang’s gold tradition had on gold treating processes in the central plains, as well as the important role that Xinjiang played in that regard.