Course Code
Credit
Credit Hour
Course Type
Prerequisite
Semester
Course Introduction
Artifact Design is intimately related to and heavily influenced by culture. This course introduces undergraduate students to various traditional Chinese artifacts, including ceramics, furnishings, jades, lacquer wares, and others such as root carvings, ink slabs, cold weapons, toys and textiles. Different from the traditional way of introducing artifacts categorized by material, this course adopts a topic-oriented approach to expatiate on them. The topic series include clothing, food, building, transportation, dragon-related artifacts, six indispensable capabilities that a man of honor should possess, traditional virtues, ceramic motifs, ceramic glaze colors, calligraphy and poetry on artifacts, folk living embodied in artifacts, cross-cultural communication, and so forth. Explaining traditional Chinese artifacts by classifying them into various topics, instead of materials, enables students to have a better understanding of the underlying cultural meanings of these artifacts and cultivate students’ ability to design culture-based products based on traditional handicrafts.
