The Palace Museum launched the "Ice Frolic Map" imitation enamel bookmark set.
Qing Dynasty Jin Kun, Cheng Zhidao, Fu Long'an co-painted "Ice Play Map" (partial).
China has a long history of ice and snow sports, and in ancient poetry and paintings, there have been many works with ice and snow sports as the theme. Among them, the "Ice Painting" that reflects the grand scene of ice play is well known to the public.
Ice play, also known as "ice play". As early as ancient times, people began to paint ski hunting scenes on the rocks. After the Fall of the Tang and Song Dynasties, the prototype of ice and snow sports gradually took shape. By the Qing Dynasty, ice play was widely popular as a custom. Some painters have included ice frolick scenes in their paintings, and the five more typical works that exist are: Jin Kun, Cheng Zhidao, and Fu Long'an's "Ice Frolic Map", Shen Yuan's "Ice Frolic Map", Zhang Weibang and Yao Wenhan's "Ice Frolic Map", Yao Wenhan's "Purple Light Pavilion Banquet Map", and Xu Yang's "Jing Shi Sheng Chun Poetry Intention". These Qing Dynasty paintings, in the form of courtyard body paintings, truly and vividly record the colorful ice scenes, and also provide valuable resources for the promotion of contemporary ice and snow sports and artistic creation.
Taking the Beijing Winter Olympic Games and the Winter Paralympic Games as an opportunity, the traditional ice play culture is rejuvenated through multiple forms, and the ice play-themed fine art works, landscape design, cultural and entertainment performances, digital animation, cultural and creative products emerge in an endless stream, shaping a new cultural landscape and telling the Chinese story of the new era. For example, at the "Light of Life 2022 9th China Beijing International Art Biennale", the print "Gaoge Winter Olympics, Ice and Snow Love" by young painter Ren Huihui not only borrowed from the scroll-style composition of the Qing Dynasty's "Ice Frolic Map", but also innovated the content and form. The first half of the work focuses on traditional ice frolic activities, while the second half selects the main venues and sports of the Beijing Winter Olympics to show modern ice and snow sports scenes. The work breaks the rules of traditional schemas with irregular folding figures, and interprets cultural dialogues across time and space in ancient and modern photographs. Cai Guoqiang, the chief visual artist for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, also took inspiration from "Ice Fun" and created "Galaxy Ice". The artist uses multiple fireworks to create brilliant colors on the glass mirror surface. The circular structure derived from "Ice Play map" resembles the vast cosmic Milky Way, showing the artist's beautiful imagination of playing ice in the Milky Way.
Ice frolic culture not only provides rich nourishment for art creation, but also adds bright colors to contemporary social life. In Beijing's Winter Olympic Village, the landscape design of the central garden also borrows from the ring structure in "Ice Fun", and the highly fluid shape symbolizes movement and change, contrasting with the static architectural space around it. The classical Chinese aesthetics of having or not living together are popular in the vaporization of garden space, which has become an externalized presentation of the concept of "form is content" in modern design. There are also some skating enthusiasts, because of their love for "Ice Play", come together to "restore" the technical movements of traditional ice play, and show it to the public in the form of folk entertainment performances, so that more people know about this traditional ice sport. Many cultural and creative designers choose interesting character forms such as archery and skating in "Ice Fun", and perform artistic refinement on the basis of the original paintings, and design and produce bookmarks, silk scarves, sticky note clips and other products that are both practical and ornamental. These diversified creations inspired by "Ice Fun Map" not only further excavate the rich mine of China's excellent traditional culture, but also make it compatible with contemporary culture and coordinate with modern society, and highlight and spread the charm of ice and snow culture in a form that people like to hear.
Compared with the dot-like excavation presentation of individual artistic creation, the advancement of digital technology has provided the possibility of all-round dissemination of ice culture. Multimedia platform interaction, online and offline interaction, and communication mode that focuses on participatory experience bring a richer sensory experience to the audience. Whether it is the "Ice Fun Paradise" project in the Palace Museum's "Palace over the New Year" digital immersion experience exhibition, the "Ice Fun Map Arena" game in the "Digital Forbidden City" Mini Program, or the "Centennial Ice Play Festival" exhibition held in Beijing Beihai Park during the Winter Olympics, all of them have made "Ice Fun Map" "come alive" with a large number of digital animation, projection interaction, 3D printing and other new means. In order to enable the audience to experience both the charm of the original work and the digital experience in the exhibition, the various project teams have carried out arduous exploration. For example, in order to produce the main scene in the animation "Centennial Ice Festival", the team of the Digital Humanities Research Center of Chinese University referred to a large number of text historical materials and historical images, decomposed a number of key actions such as character flag holding, skating, flipping, archery, etc., and then performed action editing and synthesis in three-dimensional software, so that the long-lost "Dragon Shooting Ball" could be revived by relying on modern digital technology. Although the use of digital technology makes the work quite infectious, it is equally important to retain the charm of ancient painting art. In order to preserve the aesthetic charm of ancient paintings as much as possible, the team abandoned the realistic modeling style and projection effect commonly used in ordinary animation, and instead pursued a hand-painted beauty and flat rendering method, so that the work maintained the original painterliness of traditional Chinese painting. Under the guidance of new technologies and new concepts, the contemporary "Ice Play Map" brings a unique cultural experience to the audience with innovation, formal beauty and rich cultural implications.
Throughout the ancient and modern ice frolic, although the times are different and the forms are different, they all contain people's enthusiasm for ice and snow sports and their love for traditional culture. As an important carrier of ice and snow culture inheritance, fine arts not only records the evolution of traditional sports, but also gives new connotations to ice and snow culture. How to continuously use new technologies and new methods to make China's excellent traditional culture shine with new light is a topic worthy of continued exploration by art workers.
People's Daily ( 2022.02.27 08 edition)