关键词: 五色, 五彩, 感性感受, 制度框架, 色彩消费

Abstract: Color is as a cultural presentation as a natural phenomenon. To some extent, the color culture of China is one of the fundamental issues of its culture and a theory of universal truth as all cultures have their ways to interpret colors and China is no exception. For example, in Classificaciones Primitivas by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, colors are classified as a branch of knowledge and interpreted from the perspective of social stratum. The representative Chinese philosophy regarding color is the five-color theory according to which, argues Zhou Li or Rites of the Zhou, the five cardinal colors are a spatial marker and the whole universe is the result of their changes. In other words, the five colors form an institutional framework. Another classic Chun Qiu Fan Lu applies the five-color theory to the interpretation of history, contending that the first three historical dynasties of China - the Xia, the Shang and the Zhou (app. 21st century B.C. - 3rd century B.C.) - are nothing more than three colors: green, white and red. Meanwhile the four seasons of the year are just green, red, white and black. Shan Hai Jing, or The Classic of Mountain and Sea, further elaborates on the theory by introducing the idea of five shades. While cable of accentuating the beauty of the nature, this new theoretic development remains within a variation of the above mentioned institutional framework. Depicting the whites of the scorning eyes and the color of the graying hair of people living troubled lives, Shi Sho Xin Yu alters the five-color system into monochromatic or even colorless aesthetic rhetoric before Xiao Qing Ou Ji returns to the “colorless as colorful” paradigm through brining colors back to our perceptual life. As a unique multi-dimensional cognitive pedigree comprising institutional stipulations of the government as well as sensory conception of the folk at grass roots level, the Chinese color culture manifests the great Chinese culture in general that is both profound and subtle. It is the unity of world order and individual perception. The cognition and consumption of colors will have a splendid future in the new era.

Key words: five colors, five shades, sensory perception, institutional framework, color consumption