Research On Tea Furniture Design System Based On Ming Style Furniture Type

In history, tea-related furniture has been recorded and portrayed as framework, bamboo basket, collapsible chair, and tea bed in Tang Dynasty and rarely recorded in Ming Dynasty except in the literati paintings. There is no mention of tea-related furniture in the categorization of Ming-Dynasty style furniture by Wang Shixiang and the most well-known tea table originated in Qing Dynasty. Therefore, tea furniture has not been clearly defined in history. By observing the procedure of traditional tea art, the service target of "tea" furniture, and the tea paraphernalia involved in it and analyzing the various problems existing in the tea art activities of the Ming-Dynasty literati including the water-bearing and water-resistant functions and human factors, the thesis deduces the special attributes of tea furniture that are different from other types of furniture and defines tea furniture as "serial furniture to serve the tea art and possess the dual specificity of culture and function, including furniture for sitting, bearing and containing".The dual specificity of tea furniture points out for itself a way of design from tradition to contemporary times, with the Ming-Dynasty style furniture and its impact on the tea art activities of the Ming-Dynasty literati as the starting point of the systematic research on tea furniture design. The thesis constructs and elaborates on the furniture system with type as the core and the ultra environment system with lifestyle as the core to prove its effectiveness and rationality; based on the systematic perspective of furniture and the concept of typology, the thesis analyzes the impact of the system environment including the architecture in Song and Yuan Dynasties and inside the system the lacquer wood furniture including tables such as "jin" (for wine bottles), "zu" (for sacrifices) and "an" (rectangular tables) in the times of West Zhou and East Zhou Dynasties during the process of the formation of the Ming-Dynasty style furniture type, and manifests the meaning and impact of type in this process; the thesis induces three kinds of aesthetic images of Ming-Dynasty style furniture, namely "splendor and magnificence", "beauty and elegance", and "simplicity and serenity", analyzes its meaning to contemporary tea furniture design, and points out that the beauty in Ming-Dynasty style furniture lies in the pursuit of beauty derived from the content and norm of traditional manners. Such beauty is the product of norms of that era and the tradition, of the combination of the cultivation of the aesthetic awareness of the Ming-Dynasty literati and the exertion of the craftsmen’s originality and of the combination of the scientific and rational structure of tenon and mortise joint and the sophisticated and excellent craftwork, rather than a product overnight of a genius all by himself.Tea furniture design needs innovation and modification and there are two basic approaches:firstly, make changes within the tradition; secondly, make innovations beyond the tradition. Tea furniture design needs changes within the tradition and innovations in "the places where lots of traditional practices have been conducted". Based on this, the thesis constructs a tea furniture design system with furniture system as the fundamental framework and Ming-Dynasty style furniture as the core, eliminating the destruction to the nature from the remarkable achievements of the Ming-Dynasty style furniture, conforming to the idea of "harmony between man and nature", demonstrating the Oriental art trait of "restraint is equal to performance", and adhering to the idea of "Heavenly Creations"; it takes as the basic principle of the system the cultural and functional specificity framework of tea furniture; it illustrates the point that the tea furniture design system combines the elements of culture and civilization; it connects the traditional and contemporary threads, with analogy design from type-abstraction to type-recovery to form-generation as the method, in order to meet the requirements for tea furniture to pursue changes inside the tradition; it uses utensil ecology to construct a relatively closed work net, with tea art as the theme, including the space, tea paraphernalia and tea furniture, analyzing the relationships between each other in concept and material, pointing out that the corresponding qualities of tea, tea paraphernalia, tea furniture and tea space can have advantageous or disadvantageous effects on the connotation of one another and even the work net and requiring everything in the work net to accept the orientation of tea art; the thesis uses the concepts of categorization and classification in archeological typology and cites round-backed armchair as an example, explaining the approach to analyzing the time features of formal language in the tea furniture design, pointing out that the advances of times should be assessed by the civilization level of furniture and its formal language belongs to the cultural genre and should not be selected and differentiated in accordance with how developed and undeveloped the level of civilization is.Thus, the system can provide tea furniture design with an effective and feasible scheme of theory and method.