Measuring and Evaluating the Visual Complexity of Chinese Ink Paintings

Painters arrange white space in contrast with chromatic space composed of strokes. This research measures white space, color complexity, and stroke density in Chinese ink paintings and examines how these attributes influence the paintings’ perceived complexity. Empirical evidence from twenty-one well-known modern Chinese artists’ ink paintings shows that white space decreases paintings’ complexity, while chromatic space and stroke density increase complexity. We also reveal that a large rate of white space guides the viewers’ attention on chromatic space and enhances the impacts of color complexity and stroke density on perceived complexity. An eye-tracker measures viewers’ elaboration duration on each painting, which provides consistent evidence to validate our conclusion based on subjective reported visual complexity. Our research provides insights into the rhetorical role of white space in sensory information processing

SAVOIAS: A Diverse, Multi-Category Visual Complexity Dataset

Visual complexity identifies the level of intricacy and details in an image or the level of difficulty to describe the image. It is an important concept in a variety of areas such as cognitive psychology, computer vision and visualization, and advertisement. Yet, efforts to create large, downloadable image datasets with diverse content and unbiased groundtruthing are lacking. In this work, we introduce Savoias, a visual complexity dataset that compromises of more than 1,400 images from seven image categories relevant to the above research areas, namely Scenes, Advertisements, Visualization and infographics, Objects, Interior design, Art, and Suprematism. The images in each category portray diverse characteristics including various low-level and high-level features, objects, backgrounds, textures and patterns, text, and graphics. The ground truth for Savoias is obtained by crowdsourcing more than 37,000 pairwise comparisons of images using the forced-choice methodology and with more than 1,600 contributors. The resulting relative scores are then converted to absolute visual complexity scores using the Bradley-Terry method and matrix completion. When applying five state-of-the-art algorithms to analyze the visual complexity of the images in the Savoias dataset, we found that the scores obtained from these baseline tools only correlate well with crowdsourced labels for abstract patterns in the Suprematism category (Pearson correlation r=0.84). For the other categories, in particular, the objects and advertisement categories, low correlation coefficients were revealed (r=0.3 and 0.56, respectively). These findings suggest that (1) state-of-the-art approaches are mostly insufficient and (2) Savoias enables category-specific method development, which is likely to improve the impact of visual complexity analysis on specific application areas, including computer vision.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 4 table

Monte Carlo convex hull model for classification of traditional Chinese paintings

While artists demonstrate their individual styles through paintings and drawings, how to describe such artistic styles well selected visual features towards computerized analysis of the arts remains to be a challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose an integrated feature-based artistic descriptor with Monte Carlo Convex Hull (MCCH) feature selection model and support vector machine (SVM) for characterizing the traditional Chinese paintings and validate its effectiveness via automated classification of Chinese paintings authored by well-known Chinese artists. The integrated artistic style descriptor essentially contains a number of visual features including a novel feature of painting composition and object feature, each of which describes one element of the artistic style. In order to ensure an integrated discriminating power and certain level of adaptability to the variety of artistic styles among different artists, we introduce a novel feature selection method to process the correlations and the synergy across all elements inside the integrated feature and hence complete the proposed style-based descriptor design. Experiments on classification of Chinese paintings via a parallel MCCH model illustrate that the proposed descriptor outperforms the existing representative technique in terms of precision and recall rates

Nameless Art in the Mao Era

This research project focuses on the first generation of No Name (wuming 無名), an underground art group in the Cultural Revolution which secretly practiced art countering the official Socialist Realism because of its non-realist visual language and art-for-art’s-sake philosophy. These artists took advantage of their worker status to learn and practice art legitimately in the Mass Art System of the time. They developed their particular style and vision of art from their amateur art training, forbidden visual and textual sources in the underground cultural sphere, and official theoretical debates on art. The history of No Name not only reveals the diversity of art under Mao, especially during the Cultural Revolution, but also suggests a new potential narrative of Chinese modernism that traces the inception of Chinese contemporary art to the Mao period

Luo Qing's Paintings of Post-Industrial Taiwan and Their Incompatibility with Guohua

This thesis examines the career and artwork of Luo Qing in the context of past artistic movements and current academic discourse. Using Luo Qing and his work as a point of departure, this thesis aims to combine diachronic and synchronic concerns in the arts, specifically art that is made in the medium of ink. Luo Qing is famous for his inventive style in poetry and ink paintings. The two bodies of work selected,"Here Comes the UFO" and "Asphalt Road", not only exemplify his creative spirit in redefining ink art, they also establish him as a member of the modern Chinese literati, a scholar artist, in Taiwan. Both series were Luo's ongoing projects in the 1980s and the 1990s. A conflict between the traditional and the new was present in Chinese politics and culture at the time, and this tension affected the creative community. The dynamics between Chinese imperial history and modern Chinese industry is the subject of most of Luo's work. He creatively portrayed conflicts between traditional Chinese heritage and contemporary Western commercialism. "Here Comes the UFO"and " Asphalt Road" both depict the modern subject of industrialization in traditional Chinese ink painting format. Luo Qing's novel way of approaching Chinese artistic traditions, both in painting and poetry, validated its importance as a new paradigm. Luo's artistic world depicted in these two bodies of work was representative of a tumultuous era in Chinese history that took place not in China, but in Taiwan. In stark contrast, the current academic discourse on ink art originated in China and quickly spread through the research of Chinese scholars, most of whom work in North American academia. Compelling debates on ink art's importance and passionate proclamation associating ink art with Chinese nationhood are popular subjects. These subjects, however, are distant and irrelevant to Luo's early cityscapes. The contemporary paradigm may ignore why Luo Qing came to international fame. The first part of this thesis profiles Luo's two bodies of work and provides a comprehensive survey of his training and inspiration from the past. The second part connects these works with a thorough overview of scholarship on contemporary ink art. Using Luo's work as an intersecting point of reference, I hope to revive Luo Qing's significance to the Chinese art community and address specific, larger issues concerning contemporary theories on ink art

Tracing the Past, Drawing the Present

The group of work, Rising Water, Floating Islands is inspired by traditional Chinese scroll landscape paintings. Such landscape paintings combine meticulous technique, compositional complexity, and tension between representation and abstraction to reveal an alternative universe that waits discovery amid our mundane existence. In “Rising Water, Floating Islands,” I explore the political and social ramifications of the ongoing cultural conflict between traditional and emergent contemporary values. By combining traditional Chinese elements and techniques with my own markings and gestural adaptation in my painting, I give the audience the opportunity to contemplate the implications of our present digital condition through traditional esthetic forms. I value the power of traditional Chinese esthetics to reveal philosophical dispositions, and I incorporate this perspective through the mark-making system that I created, which brings references to contemporary technologies and social systems into emotional assimilations with the painting as an alternative way of being in the world

Avant Garde in Chinese Art

The question that I propose to examine here is to what extent or in what sense there has been an avant-garde presence in Chinese art. And in what sense is the avant-garde present in contemporary Chinese art connected to avant-garde in the west. Before examining the relevance of the avant-garde to developments in Chinese art, it is necessary to provide a brief account of avant-garde in western art

From Tradition To Modernity: Craftsmanship Of Four Treasures Of The Study And The Evolution And Development Of Painting Techniques

This thesis delved into the evolution of Chinese painting styles, spanning from ancient times to the present, placing emphasis on both traditional art painting styles and contemporary illustrations. By closely examining the production process of the Four Treasures of the Study (ink, inkstone, brush, paper) and thoroughly analyzing the fundamental elements of lines, ink tones, and aesthetic conception, this paper aims to demonstrate the similarities and differences between ancient Chinese art and contemporary Chinese illustration and how tools of the time influenced stylistic evolution over time. Additionally, the author’s visual thesis integrates artistic techniques from the past with contemporary painting methods, aiming to pay homage to an ancient heritage and evoke a sense of nostalgia for one’s homeland