Research on the Audience’s Cognition and Preference of the Styles of Chinese Landscape Paintings

Abstract

The main purpose of the research is to explore the audience’s cognition of the styles of Chinese landscape paintings through a case study of Chinese landscape paintings. Taking five landscape paintings of different styles created by the author at Hongcun Town of Huangshan as samples of the research, 127 respondents from the online community were invited to take part in the research. Eight styles were selected such as elegant and primitive, composed and powerful, ethereal, vigorous and smooth, wild and cold to describe the styles of Chinese landscape paintings and evaluate the ordinary audience’s cognition of these styles. The results indicate: 1. The twelve styles introduced in the ancient theory of painting can be used as evaluation criteria for the contemporary Chinese landscape paintings, which are positively related with the preference of the works. 2. The twelve styles show certain clustering effects, which can generally be divided into two categories. 3. The artistic conception of the works is highly related with the preference of the works.