Contemporization and Continuous Evolution of the Visual of Chinese Culture: A Framework with Principles and a Condition Derived from Visual Creative Practice

Chinese Culture is not a fixed cultural system that was completed in the past and waits to be preserved by later generations, but a cultural whole that continuously forms, absorbs, and develops through historical continuation. The traditional component of Chinese Culture, as the historical accumulation of this whole, should not be understood merely as the preservation and reproduction of existing historical forms, but should also include the capacity to continuously generate new expressions under the conditions of a new era. Based on the author’s long-term visual creative practice concerning the traditional component of Chinese Culture, this article conducts a reflective analysis of the transformations of cultural content and elements in pixels, digital light effects, comics, contemporary abstract visuals, and modern symbols, and extracts two core creative principles from them: the “Chinese Culture Visual Formal Renewal Principle (CC-VFRP)” and the “Chinese Culture Visual Selective Emphasis Principle (CC-VSEP)”. CC-VFRP emphasizes that the traditional component of Chinese Culture should continuously absorb new visual languages, new technologies, new media, new forms, and new symbols generated in different eras, thereby forming visual forms belonging to the corresponding eras; CC-VSEP proposes that, on the basis of fully understanding cultural objects, Chinese Culture visual creation should highlight and promote the cultural strengths within them that are worthy of inheritance through artistic means such as selection, refinement, focus, emphasis, exaggeration, symbolization, and visual narration. On this basis, this article proposes the “Chinese Culture Visual Cultural Continuity Condition (CC-VCCC)” as the basic boundary condition to which the two principles are jointly subject, and the two principles together with this condition constitute the “Chinese Culture Visual Evolution Framework (CC-VEF)”. This framework holds that the Contemporization of the traditional component of Chinese Culture is not a one-time unidirectional transformation from “tradition” to “the contemporary”, but a creative mechanism that can occur repeatedly in different eras throughout the process of the continuous evolution of Chinese Culture. Each era is both an inheritor of Chinese Culture and its new creator. On the basis of the CC-VEF at the specific cultural application level (Chinese Culture Application Level), this article further abstracts the structure that is not limited to specific cultural objects into the “Visual Evolution Framework (VEF)”, which consists of the “Visual Formal Renewal Principle (VFRP)”, the “Visual Selective Emphasis Principle (VSEP)”, and the “Visual Cultural Continuity Condition (VCCC)”, and proposes that this general theoretical level has the potential for further application and examination in other cultural contexts. Cultural inheritance with genuine developmental significance is not about making Chinese Culture permanently retain the forms of the past, but about maintaining the continuity of culture while enabling it to continuously acquire new forms belonging to each new era, and continuously promoting, through artistic creation, the cultural essence and strengths within it that are worthy of being cherished.