Study On The Application Of Zen Ideology On Artistic Creation And The Inspiration To Design

The ideology of Zen plays a very important role in Buddhist culture. It originally stemmed from India, and then striven and boomed when it came to China and combined with Chinese traditions and culture, which exerted a great impact on both countries’ religious culture. The spring up of Zen could be traced back in the middle-late stage of Tang Dynasty, during which Zen had been promoted to an extremely high-ranked position in the whole society and thus had profoundly influenced mass public in the field of art and aesthetics regarding to the effects of introspection and intuition for original creation. From that period of time, many eastern-labelled artifacts were on the basis of “peaceful and quiet” and “flexible and harmonious” concept whilst integrated with Chinese and Japanese traditional culture.This paper starts with Zen’s ideology along with its origin and development to try to analyze and elaborate Zen’s performance within artistic creation in terms of, for example, courtyard, ceramics, garment, ikebana, tea ceremony, packaging, etc. After that, the similarities and differences towards aesthetics and Zen between China and Japan will be discussed to reveal the cover of Zen, that is, Zen is not visionary but visible, which comes from and go through our lives smoothly and closely. In particular, although “Zen” has more ways to express itself in modern society, its fundamental conceptual elements such as “the beauty of simple” and “inherent spirit” are not change and out of time but are more precious as time goes on. Thus, together with living examples, three closely related fields-“the text does not stand”, “awakening” and “the method of no differentiate”- were chosen to study the impact and enlightenment of Zen ideology, from which we could draw conclusion as follows: 1. Minimalism Aesthetic and the way of Zero Design derived from “the text does not stand”; 2. “Awakening” in-detailed discussed how innovative creation developed from birth; 3. “The method of no differentiate” further elaborated the possibility to surpass the contradiction between “move” and “motionlessness” as well as “symmetry” and “asymmetry”.In short, as an important carrier of culture, design and culture could improve each other in a healthy way. Via in-depth researching of Zen’s aesthetics, this article summarized a number of eastern-labelled theories and methods for design in order to explore their practical value and to seek the joint point for and between Zen’s concept and jewelry design. Accordingly, moulding, colour, material and artistic conception will be taken into consideration in order to explore a proper way of jewelry design, in which could integrate Zen into jewelry design as Chinese characteristic symbol. In order to achieve this purpose, the author has tried to design two Zen’s conceptual jewelries, and the author hope this would be helpful for those who interested in jewelry design and Zen culture in their future work.