Cui Yuehan
Color. 2026, 44(2): 74-77.
Printmaking, as an extremely important carrier of Chinese traditional visual art, boasts a color language that goes beyond mere visual decoration. It represents a comprehensive expression system intertwining craft characteristics, cultural connotations, and aesthetic ideals. Due to the objective limitations of woodblock printing techniques, traditional prints naturally develop a simple, pure, and high-contrast color feature. Simultaneously, influenced by traditional culture and folk beliefs, they evolve into a meaningful color symbol system. Color serves not only as an element of image form but also as a medium for emotional transmission and a means of visual narration. Therefore, traditional prints create emotions through tone, enhance emotions through contrast, express feelings through details, and construct narrative logic through symbolization, rhythm, and negative space. This article conducts an in-depth analysis of the artistic characteristics, emotional mechanisms, and narrative logic of traditional printmaking's color language, explores its cultural value, provides theoretical support for the inheritance and innovation of contemporary printmaking creation, and promotes the contemporary transformation of traditional visual art.
