Pictographic Design Of Chinese Characters That Are Related To Food

I wandered around on  Matt Schiavenza's, A China Journal  (get over there and check it out. A great site with excellent articles - written well.) for an hour or so this morning and bumped into an interesting piece about Chinese characters that are related to food.  The original post is located on the EDGE website.  If you have an interest in the written Chinese language, and food, I think you will enjoy this article.  Test yourself and see how many you know.

While Chinese characters were originally pictographic, most of the current versions have been simplified to the point where you can’t recognize their origins. We recently came across an interesting take on Chinese pictographic characters in the form of food-related words. Shanghai-based Win tipped us off to her wonderful designs which cover characters including seafood, vegetables, meat, and fruit. For each character, some element or stroke of the character has been stylized in the form of the object it represents.

Win admits this work is influenced by the Japanese designer Hiromura Masaaki’s food characters and embarked on the project as an experiment. Performing the exercise, Win discovered that simplified characters have removed a lot of the original meaning from characters and it can be hard to capture their essence with pictographs.

Ideogram Fun

Via Sean at NeoChaEDGE, here’s a cool visual representation of the Chinese characters of various food items.

From left to right, top to bottom: 羊: sheep 牛: cow, ox 猪: pig 葱: onion 蒜: garlic 鱼: fish 虾: shrimp 蟹: crab 菜: vegetables 笋: shoots (also part of the word for asparagus: 芦笋) 鸡: chicken 鸭: duck 鹅: goose 蛋: eggs 竹: bamboo 茄: eggplant 菇: mushroom 瓜: melon 藕 lotus root 萝: carrot 苹: apple 梨: plum 橙: orange 柠: lemon 莓: strawberry 米: wild rice 饭: cooked rice, meal 豆: bean 萄: grape 桃: peach