Semantic Mode Of Traditional Icon

Tantou New Year painting is the sole handmade xylograph with watermark in all New Year paintings of Hunan. It's characterized by strong local culture and won the prize of Chinese folk stunt. With the deep background of ancient folk custom and countryside feature, Tantou New Year painting embodies a lot of lucky visual lansigns which can be translated by multi-semantic modes and aroses infinite culture reflection. Nowadays Tantou New Year painting draws the wide attention of artists and folk experts all over the world. They have done many researches, and classified, analysed this unique cultural heritage based on the science of fine arts, folklore, sociology, history, and culture etc. This dissertation is to set up a new research from the perspectives of iconology and on the basis of icon reality study. At the beginning of the dissertation the pre-iconography of Tantou New Year painting is described and interpreted in detail in order to reveal the forming mechanism and mode of its icon and meaning. Then the correlation and contrast between signs and meanings of Tantou New Year painting are concerned. Only when the figure design technique of Tantou New Year painting is found, the feature and type of its color and scheme is found, can the symbolic representations of the icon be found. Last the author probes into the value of Tantou New Year painting and hopes to enhance the public attention and culture identity of Tantou New Year painting. The traditional folk culture can be integrated with time spirit and transformed into modern design value if we find a suitable cut-in point and activate this ancient cultural relic successfully.