"Wind and rain wash a city of flowers" "As for this, small and full"... These popular ancient poems travel through time and space and amaze the world. At the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, the 24 solar terms countdown short film gave the global audience a picture of the four seasons full of Chinese cultural implications, and recently, the book "Twenty-four Solar Terms and Seventy-Two Waits" co-created and polished for ten years, co-created by Xu Lijing, deputy editor-in-chief of Economic Daily, and Xu Dongdong, a member of the China Artists Association, was published by CITIC Publishing House. With more than 140 exquisite Chinese abstract paintings and nearly 80 beautiful and delicate texts, the book innovatively depicts the grand and subtle wonderful system of the twenty-four solar terms and seventy-two weather, explains the way of heaven and earth behind this system and the love for the life of all things, and fully expresses the new understanding and new thinking of China's excellent traditional culture.
The twenty-four solar terms are specific festivals in the continental calendar that indicate the change of natural rhythms and the establishment of "December Construction", which can accurately reflect the changes in natural rhythms, contain long cultural connotations and historical accumulation, and are an important part of the long history and culture of the Chinese nation, which is praised by the international meteorological community as "China's fifth greatest invention", and was officially included in the UNESCO Catalogue of Masterpieces of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016.
The book adopts the method of combining books, breaks through the traditional perspective of understanding, and enters the level of the concept of life by recognizing the twenty-four solar terms and seventy-two weather, showing the poetic aesthetics of life Chinese, and telling the contemporary value and world significance of ancient Chinese wisdom and traditional Chinese culture. In the book, the two authors ask questions with pictures, write articles with pictures, take "heaven" as the unit, carefully pursue the footsteps of the changes of the four seasons, interpret each festival and phenology, not only explain from the knowledge level, but also combine their own life experience and life experience, study and understand the changes of the heavens and the earth and magnificent life imagery of the twenty-four solar terms and seventy-two weathers, excavate the endless life energy of the Chinese nation contained in it, and give it a new interpretation of life aesthetics.
It is worth noting that the book is the first to interpret the twenty-four solar terms and seventy-two seasons with Chinese abstract paintings, and innovatively presents Chinese culture with an international artistic language. Xu Dongdong's series of group paintings of "Twenty-Four Solar Terms and Seventy-Two Seasons", which took eight years to create, has strong colors and unique textures, interpreting Chinese culture and Chinese wisdom with an innovative international painting language, so that the "old tree" of the twenty-four solar terms and seventy-two seasons has sent out the "new branches" of the culture of the times.
In addition, the book brings together famous artists from many fields to expound the historical and practical significance of the 24 solar terms and 72 from multiple dimensions such as culture, art, science, philosophy, etc., helping people to deeply understand the contemporary value of this ancient system.
Writer and scholar Wang Meng said in the recommended preface to this book that Chinese culture emphasizes the unity of heaven and man, the creation of teachers and methods, harmony and difference, beauty and commonality. In the twenty-four solar terms and seventy-two weathers, the ancients saw everything in the universe, and every phenological life is precious, and it is a whole and a system with the cosmic world. Therefore, the twenty-four solar terms and seventy-two days are the intangible cultural heritage of mankind, and the cosmology and outlook on life it contains are very remarkable, with modernity and even postmodernity, which are of great significance today and in the future and in the world. (Reporter Dou Xinxin)
Source: China Intellectual Property News