Zen And Essence Of Design-Introduction The Modern Design Under The Infulence Of Zen Design Style

As high-speed development of global economy, culture and technology information, thematerial civilization and spiritual civilization of human being have achieved a breakthroughnever seen before. It is because of the fierce competition in modern social economic life andthe people’s pursuit of high quality life, product design plays a more and more important rolein our daily lives.The “arty” modern of art design education and the weak design culture base makeChinese designers confused as to blindly follow foreign design style, making their designsdetach from domestic ones and getting nondescript. However, after Chinese art designersfound their mechanically apply according to the foreign styles only made their design stylesfailed copy, they started to retrospect to domestic style and hoped redefine their style byadding Chinese traditional culture and symbols. Both learning from foreign style and highlyvaluing Chinese traditional culture should have a limit which is the most difficult part increating Chinese design style. It is the grim problem faced by contemporary Chinese designeris how to incorporate national culture and spirit to the context of modern design, and how tocombine the traditional and modern styles to create unique Chinese style.Zen, a part of Chinese traditional culture, with its hermitic Zen philosophy and cultureconnotation, has a significant influence on Chinese and even Japanese ancient handicraft,architecture, painting, calligraphy, poetry etc. Nowadays, more and more design casessuggest that the essence of Zen like “Expressing essence”,“Epiphany” and “Naturalassimilation” is closely related with modern art design. Design is an activity for solvingproblem in daily life; Zen is philosophy of life and great wisdom to quest meaning of life; wecan develop a problem solving method in its unique way. The point of this paper is to analyzeZen style so that incorporate its Zen language and culture inside to the context of Chinesemodern design to form the unique national design language.This paper begins with “Zen style” and “Modern design”. At first, it analyzes andsummarizes the characteristic feature and positive meaning of Zen style in modern design.Then, it illustrates the embodiment of Zen in traditional art and tries to incorporate Zenphilosophy to modern design language to form a distinct design methodology. At last, itconsiders design as cultivation from a unique angle of Zen to discuss the delicate relationshipbetween Zen philosophy and design thought.