Since I started to work more intensively on deciphering the hexagrams, one of the most important sources that showed me the way was the quote from Wang Bi in which he talks about the fish trap. He says:
The images stem from the ideas.… The images are the trap for the ideas… once you have captured the ideas, you can forget the images. Wang Bi (from Zimmermann 2007, 64 and note 14)
The hexagrams of the I Ching also convey ideas, ideas of how to ideally deal with a situation, similar to a recipe. The ideas presented by the hexagrams are abstract, but they can be described in words and transformed into instructions. But, similar to a recipe: how much more appealing and comprehensible a recipe becomes when it is illustrated!
The images that illustrate an idea should definitely be born out of the idea they refer to. A recipe that is decoratively illustrated but none of the images have anything to do with the dish to be cooked is confusing. Images should illustrate the idea and make it easier for the user to access the abstract instruction’s contents. And once the user has grasped the ideas/contents, he no longer needs the images.
Having said all that, I started working with pictograms on no2DO in 2013. My aim was to symbolize the meaning and energy of the trigrams in a memorable and intuitive way. What I wanted to achieve is that the user can recognize the dynamics of a hexagram – i.e. the interplay of the energies it contains – at a glance without every time having to look up the names of the trigrams or memorize their meanings.
Ideally, pictograms make something visible that previously only existed as an abstract idea. They condense many explanatory words into a single, powerful image. And this image makes it easier to grasp the underlying idea without having to remember the many descriptive words.
The symbols I chose for the eight trigrams in 2013, which I feel illustrate the ideas behind the trigrams (and which are described in detail in the I Ching course), stem from my artistic intuition. At the time, I chose the archer, the sprouting seedling, the phoenix, the gardener, the girl feeding pigeons, the bird rider, the meditator and someone crossing an abyss – and my choice has remained the same ever since. Even when I revised the pictograms in 2024 together with a talented designer, this original symbolism was retained. We redesigned the pictograms visually, but deliberately retained the essence that these symbols have carried since 2013.
One question we asked ourselves during the 2024 redesign process was whether it would make sense to provide not only the upper and lower trigrams of a hexagram, but also the two core characters with matching pictograms. After all, two energies do not simply collide in a hexagram, but the hexagram shows how the lower trigram transforms into the upper one, a transition that takes place in the two core characters.
In the end, however, we decided not to illustrate the core characters as well. This is because a hexagram with four pictograms (lower trigram [in the case of hexagramm 11 – peace this would be Qian, the Heaven], first core character [Dui, the Lake], second core character [Zhen, the Thunder], upper trigram [Kun, the Earth]) would have been visually overloaded and therefore confusing.
So, all that remains for the user of no2DO to do is to illustrate the basic matrix of trigrams, which shows their mutual interdependence, with the pictograms:
Bibliography
— Zimmermann, Georg. 2007. I Ging – Das Buch der Wandlungen. Düsseldorf: Patmos.
