2025-11-24 The 3rd Youth Forum on Traditional Chinese Color Research
Recently, the 3rd Youth Forum on Traditional Chinese Color Research was successfully held at the Changjiang College of Art and Design, Shantou University. During the forum, Professor Song Wenwen from the Color Research Institute of Tsinghua University's Art and Science Research Center shared the theme of "Fingerprint Password of Traditional Chinese Colors".
This forum adheres to the core purpose of "creating a platform for young scholars to exchange ideas on traditional Chinese colors, exploring and cultivating reserve talents for traditional Chinese color research, and promoting innovation and development in traditional Chinese color research". It aims to build a high-quality academic exchange bridge for young scholars in the field to collide ideas and share achievements, and to help achieve continuous breakthroughs in the field of traditional Chinese color research.
The shared content comes from the color scientific measurement work of the "Oriental Traditional Color Plan" initiated by Kweichow Moutai Group, jointly undertaken by the Color Research Institute of the Arts and Science Research Center of Tsinghua University and the Color Design and Application Laboratory of the Tsinghua Qingdao Arts and Science Innovation Research Institute. As a research program that integrates art and science, its core is to collect, measure, and digitize traditional Chinese colors through scientific means, providing technical support and scientific basis for the inheritance, application, protection, and dissemination of traditional colors, and constructing a rigorous and systematic research system.
Professor Song introduced in the sharing that the research team has completed the systematic collection of 7 categories of samples, with a total of more than 300 colors included. This fruitful achievement, in the form of scientific data, concretizes ancient cultural images into inheritable and applicable digital assets, providing crucial scientific basis for subsequent academic research and innovative applications.
▲ Classification of research samples
▲ Color display of research samples
Traditional Chinese colors are deeply rooted in various objects, and precise color collection of physical samples has always been a research pain point in academia. Based on the characteristics of traditional Chinese color carriers, our project team has innovatively developed a mobile multi angle object surface colorimetric lighting box that is suitable for high glossiness, high transparency, and three-dimensional curved surface samples by matching specialized measurement equipment. This provides a new adaptation solution for traditional Chinese color measurement.
▲ Traditional Chinese Color Names (Part)
▲ Spectral curve
In the future, the construction of China's traditional color database will continue to advance towards scientific and systematic direction. It will not only further collect more representative colors from historical periods, expand the temporal dimension of color samples, but also include color data from diverse materials such as jade and agate, enrich the material coverage of samples, and simultaneously carry out in-depth exploration of ethnic color culture. The database will not only carry scientific data on colors, but also contain profound ethnic cultural connotations, providing more complete support for the all-round research and activation application of traditional colors.
