Digging "memes" from traditional culture: the birth of contemporary "faces"

Text | Ruan Bai Qing

In the eyes of the young group of "Internet surfing", emotions are not two-dimensional words, but three-dimensional and three-dimensional.

When I received the notice "Let's have a short meeting now" near 5 o'clock at the end of work, the leaderless group was indispensable for the big-headed photo of the yellow cat with a dejected face, accompanied by the text "Happy all over the face." If someone throws out a strange point of view in a chat, what follows is mostly the moment when the "subway uncle looks at his mobile phone" meme line up to express everyone's confused mood. The latest "Internet celebrity" of the meme is a pink cartoon beaver Loopy, through its exaggerated expression, the young man vaguely expresses some "yin and yang strangeness" that cannot be clearly said. Some memes go straight to the age group — the mention of "toast to our friendship" immediately conjures up to 20 to 50-year-olds of the lady in a white dress holding up wine.

In online culture, the mainstream carrier for expressing emotions is no longer words, but memes. It's hard to write a clear chronicle of emoji culture, and it seems that by the subtle, memes occupy an extremely important part of the communication system. In fact, memes are not created out of thin air, they have long existed in traditional Chinese culture - they can convey emotions without language, such as the face mask in opera.

How does Facebook make a wonderful connection to online culture?

Sui Weikang, a young Guochao illustrator designer, Cao Xue, the head of the design team of Bingdundun, the mascot of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and Kang Yong, a famous Sichuan opera performance artist at the Chengdu Sichuan Opera Research Institute, discussed and tried to integrate digital innovation into artistic creation, so that Facebook, an intangible cultural heritage culture, could be reborn on the Internet.

Facebook, the common cultural foundation of Chinese

The origin of the mask is often considered to be the mask in ancient sacrifices. During the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the monarch expected to be blessed by the gods and ancestors, and a large number of sacrifices were carried out, and masks were an indispensable item in them, representing the priest's brief transformation into a god and dialogue with the heavens.

Since then, the use of masks has gradually extended from sacrifices to literary and artistic activities. In the famous song and dance drama "Lanling King Entering the Battle", in order to show the deeds of Lanling King Gao Changgong fighting with a fierce mask image, the dancers also wore masks to dance, which is also regarded as the prototype of the application of face masks in opera.

In the opera culture that began in the Tang and Song dynasties, symbols painted on masks were transferred to faces. In the Song Dynasty, the "Three Dynasties Northern Alliance Compilation" mentioned "smearing ink for a good show", which recorded the habit of painting a white nose and drawing red eyes to perform funny scenes.

The face spectrum began to form a system in the Yuan Dynasty, where miscellaneous dramas flourished, and in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the face not only had rich colors such as red, black, blue, green, and yellow, but also some characters had exclusive face styles, and the well-known stories such as "Second Master Guan" and "Bao Gong" were interpreted many times in the opera, and their face colors were gradually fixed in this process and remained unchanged for a long time.

Kang Yong performs a face change on stage

The reason why the face is used to portray the character is because the face can best highlight the part of a human figure, god, and mind. Expressions play a key role in shaping characters in all cultures. On stage, the actors' faces take on more important image-building tasks. To portray characters through body language and lyrics, the audience needs to be fully engaged in the performance, when the color visualizes the person's character and emotions, and the demeanor is more exaggerated and understandable under the background of the color. In the visual emotions, the audience and performers have a more intuitive resonance and a deeper feeling for the story.

Schopenhauer said: "The appearance of man is a picture that expresses the heart, and the appearance expresses and reveals the entire character characteristics of the person." "In traditional Chinese drama, Facebook is the finishing touch. Sichuan opera performance artist Kang Yong used well-known theatrical roles as examples: Li Jing, the king of Tota, is a mythical character, and his color is eye-catching, so he uses purple as the base, the eyebrows are hooked, and the colors and patterns are contrasting; Overlord Xiang Yu has a rough and straightforward personality, and the way his eyebrows are handled has a feeling of a dragon flying phoenix dance. "The face mask is the true embodiment of the characters in the play, and the ornaments representing joy, anger, sorrow and happiness are used to conform to the inner world of the characters."

Kang Yong sketches a face pattern in the background

With the inheritance of traditional opera culture, Facebook has gradually formed a common cultural foundation for Chinese. Not only has the face image become one of the references to Eastern culture, but different face colors are also closely linked to the historical stories and emotions of the characters behind it. The black-faced Zhang Fei symbolizes straightness and courage, the red-faced Guan Yu symbolizes righteousness and loyalty, and the white-faced Cao Cao symbolizes treacherous power schemes... This is a long-established cultural association. Of course, there are still a large number of historical figures who have not had a "face of their own" in opera, but this does not prevent Facebook culture from entering the Chinese system and deriving Chinese linguistic resonance. For example, "one sings red face and one sings white face" is a saying borrowed from Facebook, and every Chinese can understand the meaning.

The social sentiment behind the "memes"

The emoji packs in the online language system are like a rich plate of chowder, incorporating elements from various cultures.

Each new meme entering social networks will first become popular among the "surfing crowd" with keen tentacles, and then slowly spread to a larger user base, and there is no lack of hindsighters asking around, "What is this meme", but in the end, powerful memes will dominate the online language.

The material of memes can come from a variety of cultural backgrounds and different lives. One of the most frequently used emojis is the pet theme, through cute cats and dogs photos and accompanying text, people use a gentle, innocent and tactful way to let cats and dogs speak for themselves and convey their attitudes. Another kind of meme that has been played variously comes from film and television dramas. There are two prerequisites for its popularity: the play itself is popular and has a basis for communication, and the lines or character actions happen to fit a certain high-frequency life scene outside the play. The widely used emoji "Baojuan, My Voice" at the end of 2022 appeared in a large number of WeChat group chats during that time precisely because it catered to the real daily life of the group.

With the prevalence of emoji culture, many institutions and individuals have begun to enter the field of emoji originality, and have spawned many IPs, such as Little Liu Duck and Stripe Goose. And the use of memes has in turn promoted a lot of culture to be "seen". For example, Teletubbies and sad frogs are elements in foreign anime, but due to the popularity of memes, a large number of people who usually do not pay attention to this field understand the work.

In this sense, memes themselves, as a culture that is becoming more and more popular among young people, undoubtedly play a role in spreading mainstream culture.

Kang Yong and Sui Weikang exchanged views on the painting of Zhao Gongming's face

In the various meme transmissions, people use an entertaining mentality to find emotional resonance. If you do not have common emotions and cognition with the interlocutor, you will not be able to capture the true meaning from the other party's emoji. This is also why the "smile" emoji that comes with a system conveys completely different emotions in the two groups of young people and middle-aged people. Middle-aged users use "smile" to show politeness and friendliness, but if two college students exchange "smiles", the implication is that our relationship has basically reached the point of deleting friends from each other. The root cause is that the two generations have their own emotional identity.

Young people are already familiar with the discourse system and group emotions behind memes, and they have mastered a methodology for identifying the age and personality of speakers through emoji style. Most of the people who use anime game-themed emojis are two-dimensional young people, and those who like to make panda heads must be unrestrained and talkative, and the emoji with a bouquet of heart-shaped roses as a background with colorful art words undoubtedly indicates that the person behind it is at least 50 years old. This is so because memes are only used in communication when they resonate with the cultural context of both the user and the recipient.

This is similar to the role played by Facebook in opera, red is loyalty, white is traitor, there is a common understanding on and off stage, and this communication with opera as a medium is smoother. Also based on the creation of faces, it also conveys the resonance of the group, and the emoji pack is more like the deformation and extension of Facebook in the digital age - like Facebook, covering everyone's text, intuitively expressing the social emotions of the group.

It can be said that the emoji is the face of contemporary people.

Chinese expressions belonging to 2023

As a "web surfer", young designer Sui Weikang keenly captures the common denominator of emojis and Facebook, and at the same time he has a new idea: since emojis can be regarded as the faces of contemporary people, can Facebook become emojis in turn?

With doubts, Sui Weikang found the well-known designer Cao Xue. The ice pier designed by Cao Xue's team became popular during the 2022 Winter Olympics, and "one pier is hard to find", and under his leadership, Sui Weikang's vision became a reality.

Design guide Cao Xue is more accustomed to understanding the importance of "memes" from the perspective of graphic expression. He jokingly said that contemporary young people have grown up "reading pictures", and in the fast-paced living environment, a picture can replace thousands of words, compared to written language, visual language has a special charm that cannot be replaced.

Cao Xue gave Sui Weikang design suggestions

Drawing Facebook into memes is an intersection between traditional culture and online culture, and this collision makes Cao Xue feel excited and challenging. The culture of opera has been passed down from generation to generation, and the face itself has been stylized, "which face represents which character and what kind of character, these cultural symbols have been verified by history." We must express traditional culture in a contemporary way, so that what has been locked up can be expressed in the aesthetic language of the current era. ”

Secondary creation is not an easy task, and the first problem designers encounter is how to draw new ideas. Obviously, the original face masks in opera cannot be directly copied, otherwise it is divorced from the original intention of "combining with contemporary aesthetic language", and may not be universal. "Some elements of traditional culture are too complex, and in order to become a popular form in contemporary times, it is necessary to extract the essence and summarize it at a high level."

Kang Yong put forward the design requirements for this set of memes from a more practical level: "The face should be concise, and it will be liked at a glance; The characters should be grounded, and the expressions and words should match; Even the characters' accessories, costumes and props have to match the expressions. ”

The second question immediately came to the designers: there are hundreds of faces in the opera, which character should be chosen to draw?

Cao Xue prefers to analyze from the connection point between Facebook and emoji - since we want to express the social emotions of contemporary people, why not choose an appropriate image based on the emotions themselves? "Visual communication must be conveyed." The precise match between the mood and the character's background is the first condition. They trace history, search for characters that can resonate with it, and one by one vivid characters come out of the dust of history: the phrase "laughing and getting rich" at the New Year carries over the whole year with its festive meaning, and no character is more suitable for conveying this emotion than the God of Wealth; Young people popular "tie" culture, and then subdivided into rice matches, music festival partners, drama partners, etc., Cao Xue believes that if there is the word "partner" in ancient times, it must be Qin Qiong and Wei Chigong's pair of "door god partners"...

The "door god partner" formed by the combination of Wei Chigong and Qin Qiong

In these characters that have been excavated into the "modern temperament", the designers express the emotions of modern people: the most prominent feature on the face of Zhao Gongming, the "God of Wealth", is "money on the face", one side of the ingot, the other copper coin, and even the hat has the ornament of gold ingot. Kang Yong also believes that the God of Wealth is very suitable for the context of young people ridiculing each other about "getting rich overnight", "The image of the God of Wealth is upright, kind, and affinity, and he is willing to bring good luck to the masses." ”

Emoji design based on Zhao Gongming "Smile made a fortune"

No matter what kind of creativity, design must be based on common cognition, otherwise expression will lose meaning, which tests the designer's cultural skills. The drawing process of the emoji pack itself tests the designer's technical skills.

"Memes are displayed on specific electronic media, and it shrinks into very small areas, so be more concise and generalized. To draw an image, the traditional line drawing method requires hundreds of strokes, but put it in an emoji, and it takes three or five strokes to see who it is. Cao Xue introduced that this also puts forward higher requirements for drawing tools.

The Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2-inch brought by Sui Weikang made Cao Xue feel a new creative experience. With Huawei's ultra-10,000-level pressure-sensitive stylus, designers can restore the sketching brush strokes and coloring methods of the face on the tablet, and the smoother handiness allows the long line to be drawn in place, and the finger can control the delicate change of the line by applying pressure to the pen head, accurately point out the micro-expressions of the face characters, and portray fine patterns.

Cao Xue modified the Qi Tian Dasheng emoji

Because it is created according to the theatrical face, the color of the emoji also needs to restore the brilliant and colorful face itself as much as possible, for digital creation, want to use the color elements of the traditional face to shine, a good tool carrier is very important, Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2-inch industry's first flexible OLED screen can restore full colors, so that the rich Chinese color tone better conveyed, the precise color of the nib is almost the same as the color grading of the real brush. When the facial emoji moves on the tablet, the classic characters that exist in the poetry are also "reborn", and the smooth and high-definition graphics make the details of the clothes and expressions come to life.

In order to better complete the creation of emojis, Sui Weikang also visited monuments to understand the historical life of the characters and the cultural origin behind them. Relying on this tablet, which weighs only 580g and is 5.5mm thin, designers can take it anywhere and record the flash of inspiration in their minds anytime, anywhere. At the same time, thanks to the Huawei MatePad Pro's 13.2-inch large screen and 94% ultra-high screen-to-body ratio, designers have a larger drawing space, spread out on the tablet, and creativity can break through the limitations of the past.

In the exchange with Sui Weikang, Cao Xue deeply felt that modern science and technology are injecting new vitality into traditional culture, and electronic products bring new propositions and more possibilities to traditional culture. Chinese brands represented by Huawei are helping Chinese traditional culture to achieve intergenerational inheritance in their own way, and young people like Sui Weikang are also taking over the baton of traditional culture with new creativity and inspiration.

A Facebook meme based on a historical figure

The popularity of electronic products allows everyone to show their fresh perspectives and novel ideas on traditional culture with the help of tablets, and the improvement of Huawei's tablet creation capabilities has made painting design simpler and more convenient. Love is the best driving force for cultural inheritance, and Huawei tablets are using technological innovation to help more people pay attention to, understand, and carry forward traditional culture. In this era of technological progress every day, they will find that traditional culture is wearing modern new clothes and entering the public's field of vision with a trendy attitude. The serious proposition of cultural inheritance does not have to be shackled to museums, classrooms and books. Traditional culture can also be lively, open and interesting, close to life with a more simple and friendly image, and find a way to continue in the contemporary era in a digital way.

"I would like to share with you a quote from Chopin. Chopin said that when humans could not communicate with words, music was born. I will change the concept, when human beings can no longer express emotions or even reflect emotions in words, they must try to express emotions in graphic language. Cao Xue said.

With the blessing of digital technology, Facebook not only wins applause on the opera stage, but also plays an active role in the online world and the daily life of the younger generation, becoming a carrier for transmitting Chinese emotional resonance. As a result, history flows and takes on a new lease of life in modern times.

(Topical)