Enlightenment of the Changxin Palace Lamp from Xihan Dynasty on Chinese Modern Design

Abstract

“The Book of Changes - Xici” said a saying: “Taking metaphysical as Tao, taking physical as tangible, a true gentleman doesn’t go with the latter.”, which roughly means that we should pay more attention to the “Tao” in the understanding of things, instead of merely imitating their superficial practices. “Tao” is the unique ideology of Chinese philosophy, which contains the law of all things, the whole processing cycles and the methods. Yet China's most modern designs lack souls, always just blindly imitating and copying, are “Tangible” followers as well as losing the meaning of design itself. That results in creating seemingly good appearance however not practical goods at usage from the designs, furthermore these designs are not only short of the Chinese tradition but also lose the “Tao” spirit of China. Today let’s try to discover the “Tao” philosophy of design in ancient times and hope to acquire some inspiration for the modern Chinese design by introducing the outstanding representative of the bronze lamps from the Xihan dynasty – the Changxin Palace Lamp, which sets aesthetic, practical, scientific characteristics as one, and is the world's earliest green-concept design lamp product.