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Colorful analysis of city’s elegant shades of gray
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CHROMATISTS — experts in color planning — believe each city has its own distinctive palette: passionate hues for Brazil; dazzling for New Delhi; or romantic for Paris.
When Hangzhou launched an urban color study program a decade ago, locals said its representative colors should be the green of its scenery, the gold of its autumn leaves, or the white of its bridges and houses.
Another answer might be gray. However, this doesn’t mean that the city’s dreary, but rather refers to a series of beautiful and elegant hues, ranging from light to dark gray.
This is the result of a study based on 25,000 photographs taken in urban Hangzhou. The panel was led by Song Jianming, a leading chromatist in the country and deputy director of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.
Song points out that far from being a dreary monotone, “gray” actually covers more than 10,000 shades.
But in any case, Song suggests a less loaded name for Hangzhou’s color, shui mo dan cai — literally meaning ink wash and light tinge.
“The old urban area of Hangzhou, like Chinese ink paintings, is poetically gray. The new town is more colored, not heavily, but more like pastels,” explains Song.
Based upon the study, Song and his colleagues began programs cataloguing Hangzhou’s distinctive tints.
The renovated Southern Song Imperial Street, a strip with more than 1,000 years of history, features old gray brick and cement walls, paved with dark-gray and light-gray flagstones.
Meanwhile, the Hangzhou International Expo Center in Qianjiang New Town, which is currently under construction, is light gold, echoing the nearby Hangzhou Grand Opera House, said to resemble a silver moon, and InterContinental Hotel, which is shaped like a golden Earth.
“If you take a boat along the Qiantang River, the construction projects become united and lively, with their own rhythm,” he says.
At the Baima Lake, this year’s China International Cartoon and Animation Festival’s main venue, the building facades feature tinted glass and are topped with pale gold roofs. They are shaped like the hills surrounding them.
“People sometimes misunderstand and think that urban chromatists are supposed to give cities more color,” says Song.
“Actually, they’re not capable of doing that. A city’s color is formed during its history, and what experts do is — following research — save the widely accepted colors and remove incompatible ones.”
Urban color planning originated in Europe and is now an important discipline in China, as a result of rapid urbanization.
Song, 57, who was born in Fujian Province, is viewed by many as the master of the chromatist’s art in China. He studied in L’ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoration in Paris for six years, as a visiting scholar and also for a PhD.
The artist started painting as a teenager, making his own dyes by grinding minerals and herbs. Song says he could “blend any color that can be seen the nature”.
He worked as a designer in 1970s and after the “cultural revolution” (1966-76) went to college in 1978, studying dyeing and weaving in Zhejiang Art College, now the China Academy of Art.
At college, Song was frustrated that while his dyes looked correct, when applied to fabrics the tone was different.
To solve this he independently studied Japanese and Japanese color theories. Eventually, he figured out how to get his dyes right and made a chromatography sphere, featuring almost 10,000 fabric colors, as his graduation work.
Two years later, Song had an opportunity to visit France as one of only two designers from China’s mainland that year.
Winning a national scholarship from the French government, Song studied with French chromatist Jean Philippe Lenclos and when he returned to Hangzhou in 1987, he started making studies for Hangzhou scenery sites — including Solitude Hill, Hupao Spring and Three Pools Mirroring the Moon.
In the 1990s Song was invited by the Academie de la Couleur to go to Paris as a researcher. After studying there for three years, Song believed he was finally “clear about what the urban color planning system is” and returned to Hangzhou with an ambition to beautify the city.
“Western cities are different from Chinese cities. In the West most cities are developed so their colors are fixed, while in China most cities are developing and their colors appear unsystematic — attributed to newly built constructions and numerous advertising boards.”
Song’s solution is to catalogue a city in different parts — the old and the new — and then sort out their colors separately.
He and his colleagues also offer solutions to many Chinese cities’ authorities by helping them find what colors should be used in new developments.
Nevertheless, Song believes that listening to urban color planning experts is merely the first step to unify a city’s color. To avoid disordered muddled buildings or advertising boards, the main task should be to improve the country’s aesthetics education, he says.
“If we cultivate beautiful hearts, we will reap beautiful cities,” Song says.
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