"Beauty" And "Usage"

With the prevalence of drinking tea, tea cups gradually evolved into the typical everyday utensils for drinking tea. Initially they only had the practical function, and along with the unceasing improvement of people's living standards, they were endowed with the artistic beauty, being a distinctive unity of practicability and aesthetics.Song Dynasty porcelain tea cups are highly praised as the model work of combining practicability with aesthetics perfectly, whose designs are novel, fresh and beautiful, tall and straight, delicate and elegant, and whose glazing colors and decorations all embody the aesthetic taste of the Song people to an astounding aesthetic realm.This paper describes the origin of the tea cups, their production technology, and the journey of the changes of shapes of wares from the initial pursuit of visual senses to the latter focus on the spiritual enjoyment. Taking the Song culture as the big background, Song culture, customs and Song people'aesthetic orientation as the penetrating point, the paper analyzed and deduced that the continuous innovations of the Song porcelain tea cup techniques out of the old were inextricably linked with the progress of the society at that time. The beauty of the Song porcelain tea cups were further discussed:the shapes "dignified and elegant", "in thousands of postures ", "quiet and gentle", "fair, slim and graceful", "pictograph meaning"," unity of form and spirit "; glazing colors "soft and quietly elegant", "moist as jade "," totally natural "; rich and unique decoration themes. Their techniques of expression are "plainly natural" and "peacefully elegant," and the integrated use of various producing techniques of carving, scratching, picking, painting and sculpturing made the utensils be the perfect unity of aesthetic beauty and practical function, making the objects lively and vivid, and full of the air of life, and makes everyone love them and not want to put them down.