Relationship between a Visual Art and Its Cultural Background

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore the relationship between a particular culture and its visual art by comparing two landscape paintings with distinctive cultural backgrounds. The Chinese landscape painting Early Spring (1072) and the Western landscape painting The Hay Wain (1821) respectively created by Guo Xi and John Constable are chosen for the purpose. The two paintings are compared by adopting Michael O’Toole’s (1994) systemic-functional model for the analysis of visual images in terms of Modal, Compositional and Representational functions. The comparison shows that the semiotic choices are different across the three functions. This paper then explains the semiotic differences between the two paintings by examining the distinctions between Chinese and English cultures. The findings in the research suggest that the semiotic distinctions in visual arts arise from different understandings of some fundamental values and principles in different cultures.