| As a special makeup and formative art in the Chinese opera, Chinese opera facial makeup has been profoundly influenced and nurtured by traditional Chinese culture and national spirit; it has broadly inherited and absorbed precious nourishments of folk arts. Having boldly drawn on decorative techniques and color using principles from the folk arts, and refined, processed and transformed various kinds of artistic elements, opera facial makeup formed a unique/particular decorative art means and color using design rules with aesthetic and modeling characteristics. Depending on exaggerated modeling as well as abundant colors and patterns, features of opera roles represent such characteristics of loyalty and turpitude, good and evil, beauty and ugliness as well as characters. In the long term social life, people have formed conventional consensus on the facial make-ups, which contain praise and blame and distinguish good from evil. Theses facial make-ups are full of strong moral evaluation feelings and historical knowledge and meanwhile reflect manifold factors of traditional Chinese culture.At present, fundamental values of traditional Chinese culture still exist; local cultures are also frequently emphasized in the design. However, design and application of facial make-ups, more often than not, are in a vogue and confused status of"using daily but being unaware". Exploring modeling rules, color languages, visual symbol language and deeply excavating the connotation of traditional national cultures in the opera facial make-ups, which are part of traditional Chinese culture, enable us to find more content as references of modern design. The artistic elements as well as cultural and spiritual factors contained in the facial make-ups, of positive significance, play an enlightening role and become an inexhaustible treasury in the modern design.The article, different from prior introductory statements of Chinese opera facial make-ups as isolated object concept, attempts to research and refine elementary language in the opera facial make-ups, excavates profound connotations beneath these facial makeup, explores contents that are contributive to spiritual sources and application values of modern design, enrich cultural connotations in designs and enhances added values of designs through systematically combing out the facial make-ups on the basis of national cultures with culture and design as the starting point. Moreover, the paper stresses that the application of opera facial make-ups in the design is not simple addition and copy but pay special attention to grasping national aesthetic consciousness and psychology. The article argues that it is reasonable to adopt concrete or abstract processing mode, extract element symbols that highlight meanings of Chinese culture in such aspects of types, colors, patterns of facial make-ups, then make reasonable application of them, making them fuse in various design areas and underline thoughts and ideas of Chinese design. |
