Chinese Ink Painting Research Articles

중국 단편 수묵 애니메이션 <구스 마운틴>(2023)의 주제 표현에 대한 연구

Since the 1990s, traditional Chinese ink animation has declined due to its complexity, lack of entertainment value, and high production costs. Although digital technology has been introduced to innovate, there remains the problem of the pictorial nature of ink painting being sacrificed for the spatiotemporal characteristics of animation. Therefore, this paper explores human desire and nature through the character portrayal and mountain shaping in Goose Mountain. The director combines the traditional ink painting technique of “Cunfa (皴法),” Western sketching, the characteristics of the French Left Bank cinema movement, and the theory of “Breaking the Fourth Wall” to portray the characters. In doing so, Goose Mountain inherits the tradition of the “Chinese Animation School” while adapting to the development of the digital age, embracing Western film and animation techniques, and reflecting the creative ideology of “using Chinese essence with Western methods.” Through this ideology, Goose Mountain maintains the unique traditional aesthetics of Chinese ink animation—“the integration of virtual and real (虚实相生)”—while achieving a strong visual effect. As a result, Goose Mountain balances various artistic styles, reflecting the modern human condition of “worrying about gain and loss before obtaining something, and worrying about losing it after obtaining it.” Ultimately, it conveys the lesson that “life is like a rootless plant, drifting like dust on the road.” Based on this theme, this paper presents a viable visual strategy for the modern entertainment market while inheriting the culture of traditional Chinese ink painting.

Expansion painting: a visual essay

ABSTRACT ‘Expansion Painting: A Visual Essay’ attempts another way of thinking about and through my practice of expansion painting through the form of a visual essay. In Asian art, images and words often come together as one. As can be seen in Chinese ink painting, images and words appear on the same visual plane, suggesting we look equally at both, seeing and reading both image and text. I aim to replicate this equal relationship between images and words in this paper as ‘another’ form of expansion painting. The image/text relationship also aims to reflect the viewers’ ambiguous relationship between their bodies and the work in the installations.

Evolution of the still life in Chinese ink painting (the first half of the 20th century)

Evolution of the still life in Chinese ink painting (the first half of the 20th century)

A Comparative Study on the Painting Forms of Western Oil Painting and Chinese Ink Painting

Since modern international students introduced oil painting on a large scale to China, oil painting has been developing in China for over a hundred years. In citing the process of progress, learning, integration, and improvement, the change in titles from “Western painting” and “Western painting” to “oil painting” and then to “Chinese oil painting” indicates that oil painting, as an art form, has deeply embodied the characteristics and connotations of traditional Chinese culture. During this period, its development is closely related to the historical background of the entire China, reflecting the continuation and evolution of traditional Chinese freehand brushwork spirit in the complex and changing context of the times. This article compares oil paintings imported from abroad with domestic ink painting, taking the artistic realm of painting in both the East and the West as the starting point. The main axis that runs through them is Chinese ink painting and Western oil painting landscapes. Showcasing the similarities and differences between Chinese ink wash landscape painting and Western oil painting landscapes, Chinese landscape painting emphasizes the expression of emotions and a sense of awe and emotion towards nature, with the main idea of “learning from nature”; The Western oil painting landscape emphasizes the realism of the scenery, which is a re-creation of nature, allowing people to have a realistic feeling of being there when watching the painting. The main reason there are these differences between Chinese ink painting and Western oil painting landscapes is due to different social and cultural backgrounds and fields of consciousness.

The Creation of Loneliness in Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting - Revelation from Harald Sohlberg's Paintings

This research employs methods of iconography analysis to dissect the visual representation of loneliness in the paintings of Harald Sohlberg, aiming to inspire in the creation of loneliness within Contemporary Chinese ink painting. The article unfolds by delving into Sohlberg's painting style, cultural origins, and the profound meanings embedded within his works, subsequently exploring the revelations of Sohlberg's paintings for contemporary Chinese ink painting, and thereby elucidating the author's creation. By providing novel perspectives and methodologies, this paper contributes to the realm of cross-cultural research in the arts, demonstrating the existence of commonalities diverse backgrounds, cultures, and artistic genres, with the aspiration of fostering mutual understanding and exchange across different cultures and nations. Furthermore, this article serves to inspire painters in their creations and aids in enhancing the audience's appreciation and aesthetic sensibilities towards painting.

Multi-modal Metaphorical Analysis of Children’s Picturebook <i>Little Stone Lion</i>

Little Stone Lion stands out as a member of Xiong Liang's "Chinese Illustrated Book" series. This work tells the story from the perspective of the stone lion at the bridgehead of the town, recounting its observations, experiences, and feelings. This book integrates traditional Chinese ink painting techniques with cultural elements, presenting a Chinese-style visual creation. Drawing upon a qualitative research approach, the study employed a comprehensive analysis of Little Stone lion, focusing on identifying and interpreting the verbal, pictorial, and multimodal metaphors employed in the illustrations and their relation to the accompanying text. The study delved into the interplay between visual and textual elements, examining how they contribute to the creation of metaphoric meaning and literary depth in the picturebook. This research sought to uncover metaphorical meanings derived from the situational and conceptual-cognitive contexts as well as the underlying thematic and emotional layers embedded within the picturebook. As the only guardian deity of the town, the little stone lion has witnessed the growth and departures of countless generations, silently guarding this land and its people. Multimodal metaphors identified from camera angles, colors, and its plain monologue are enough to touch the heartstrings and evoke a deep sense of nostalgia for one's hometown and loved ones.

A Multi-Branch Residual Network Based on Depth Correlation Features for the Classification of Chinese Ink Paintings

Despite significant strides in digital classification of Chinese ink paintings, existing methods predominantly rely on low-level features, insufficient for capturing the nuanced artistic styles of such works. This study introduces a novel multi-branch residual network that leverages depth correlation features to enhance the classification of Chinese ink paintings. We innovatively combine global style features, extracted using the Gram matrix, with local brushstroke features obtained via the Holistically-Nested Edge Detection(HED) method. This dual-feature approach addresses the limitations of previous studies by incorporating high-level stylistic nuances alongside low-level details, resulting in a more robust classification system. Quantitative results demonstrate a marked improvement in classification accuracy, with our network outperforming existing state-of-the-art models by significant margins in both artist and genre classification tasks. This advancement not only underscores the efficacy of integrating diverse feature sets but also paves the way for more sensitive and accurate management of digital art repositories.

Oriental Consciousness in André Masson’s Automatic Paintings

André Masson has long been regarded as a representative figure of surrealist and automatism painting, but a closer look at his works makes it easy to find a dialogic nature with ancient Chinese calligraphy and painting. Influenced by Breton's concept of automatic writing, his works also draw on Chinese ink paintings of the Song Dynasty, abandoning perspective and playing the important role of white space. This paper tries to sort out the lineage of the emergence of Oriental consciousness in Masson's automatic paintings and explains the specific expression of Chinese painting in his art.

Innovative Exploration of Chinese Ink Painting’s Communication Methods in the Context of AI-generated Art

Innovative Exploration of Chinese Ink Painting’s Communication Methods in the Context of AI-generated Art

Integrating Chinese Ink Painting into Visual Communication Education: Fostering Creativity, Aesthetic Sensibilities, and Visual Communication Skills among Students

Integrating Chinese Ink Painting into Visual Communication Education: Fostering Creativity, Aesthetic Sensibilities, and Visual Communication Skills among Students

Rendering and presentation of 3D digital ink landscape painting

AbstractExplore the digital rendering mode with texturing brush and ink effect, analyze and simulate the brush and ink characteristics of traditional Chinese ink painting, especially the art of landscape painting, and try to integrate the texture of wrinkle method synthesis map and modeling technology based on particle deposition and stacking (overlapping) to render, thus realizing the computer simulation of small freehand brushwork and large freehand brushwork (splash ink) ink effects in traditional landscape painting. This research inherits and develops the esthetic theory and thought of traditional ink painting art, and makes some beneficial exploration in the field of digital freehand ink painting, which has positive reference value and promotion significance for the development of Chinese ink painting.

Ink painting style transfer using asymmetric cycle-consistent GAN

Chinese ink painting, an artistic and cultural treasure, necessitates automatic generation for its preservation and evolution. We've innovatively observed and validated that the domain information between photographs and ink paintings, is asymmetrical, which has been overlooked by current style transfer algorithms. We propose an innovative generative adversarial network featuring an asymmetric cyclic consistency structure to address this in ink painting style transfer. This structure uses generators of differing capabilities to align with the asymmetry in transformation directions, improving image quality and model optimization speed. Additionally, we introduce two unique loss functions within the network. The salient edge loss intensifies the subject in the real photo and enhances the edge stroke of the drawn subject, a distinct attribute of ink painting. The feature-wise cycle consistency loss is designed to speed up model optimization. We've also built a Chinese bird ink painting dataset to validate effectiveness of the model. Extensive experiments on this and a public dataset demonstrate that our algorithm can comprehensively learn various stylistic features of ink painting, especially regarding brushstroke style, ink diffusion, and detail preservation. Furthermore, the quantitative results indicate our approach achieves superior results in generation quality and model efficiency compared to existing methods. For instance, compared to the most recent style transfer method, our method achieves an average decrease of 9.44% and 25.32% for FID and KID metrics across three datasets and reduces training and inference time costs by 46.81% and 22.71% respectively.

Art diplomacy: Drawing China-Indonesia relations in the early Cold War, 1949–1956

AbstractThe mid-1950s saw the relationship between China and Indonesia evolve from one of mutual hostility to one of fraternity as a trend of détente emerged out of the Geneva (1954) and the Bandung (1955) conferences. This article explores why and how the two newly independent nations applied art diplomacy to reduce their ideological differences and facilitate their commercial and political rapprochements for the sake of Asian solidarity. Through contextualizing a series of art activities between the two nations, especially China’s reproduction of President Sukarno’s private collection of paintings and Chairman Mao Zedong’s gifts of Chinese ink paintings to President Sukarno, this article argues that interactions in the name of art exemplify how China shaped its modern profile as an independent and industrialized power. It will also show how China deviated from its diplomacy of ‘Leaning to One Side’, formulated in the late 1940s, towards the ‘Peaceful United Front’ of the mid-1950s. More broadly, art relations between China and Indonesia reflect intensive cultural exchanges between the newly independent, yet ideologically clashing, nations of the Third World in the postwar period and offer a multifaceted history of the Cold War beyond the binary paradigm of the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Style Transfer of Photos and Landscape Paintings Based on CycleGAN Combined with Nested Edge Detection Module

Chinese landscape paintings, especially Chinese landscape ink paintings have always been the treasure of the Chinese, or even the world culture. Due to the advancement of the science and knowledge, there are always interests for finding ways to produce Chinese landscape paintings through the way of the technology. In this paper, based on the original CycleGAN model, we are trying to transfer a real-world photograph to a typical Chinese landscape painting. To be specific, the brushwork in Chinese ink paintings contains enormous numbers of distinct and technical brush strokes which makes it extremely hard for CycleGAN to recognize and transfer Chinese ink painting. We improved the brushstroke effect of Chinese ink painting still by incorporating the Holistically Nested Edge Detection (HED) method into the CycleGAN model. The HED module puts the source image and the corresponding generated image into the convolution layer of five stages to generate their respective edge maps. The balanced cross-entropy loss calculated with edge maps is added to the total loss of CycleGAN to train the generator which is confronted with discriminator to improve output results. The addition of HED enables the extraction of edge features from the images, preserving the structural information and enhancing the accuracy of the style transfer, so the detailed of the Chinese ink painting can be transferred better in this sense. Experimental process with model building, training, validating, and predicting concludes that, complementing HED method into the original CycleGAN models well preserved distinct features in the conversion processes from real-world photographs to traditional Chinese landscape paintings.

AN ELECTRONIC ART APPROACH IN THE ADAPTATION OF WHITE SPACE ART COMPOSITION ON CHINESE INK PAINTING

White Space Art, otherwise known as Xu Shi, is not only used to create a powerful visual drawing space, but also a key composition principle and aesthetic feature in Chinese Ink Painting. This study focuses on the application of White Space Art in the implementation of the artwork. In other words, which initiatively to explore the method of combining the approach of technology with Chinese Ink Painting Art. Through the practical experience which executed by the author, intently to verify the feasibility if White Space Art to express the space philosophy of electronic art and discusses the possibility that the practical process can be used for further reference. The implementation of such a merger to achieve an artwork in the form of contemporary art which gives a new perception and meaning to the Chinese Ink Painting Art in a new context rather than in a conventional background.

Comparing color usage in abstract, oil, and Chinese ink paintings

Comparing color usage in abstract, oil, and Chinese ink paintings

A Study of the Development History and Stylistic Features of Chinese Ink Painting

The modern ink painting in China started in the 1980s and it didn't become popular until the late 1990s. Up till now, it has become a major branch of Chinese art and painting. This paper makes a brief review on the historical development of Chinese ink painting based on the current studies on the topic. Compared with the western painting, the Chinese ink painting enjoys a special position in terms of spiritual forms, Artistic function, Language Structure, ink and brush form. The study finds that ink painting has a strong philosophical conception of Chinese cultural traditions and an ideology that matches its history, culture and religious beliefs. The values and ideology of the traditional Chinese philosophical outlook can be glimpsed in ink painting, and the ancient subsistence smallholder economic system also permeated and influenced the way of painting in terms of economic and social development. This influence ultimately reflected in the ancient philosophical system of thinking .

Discuss the Countermeasures and Measures of Developing Yunnan Garden in Southwest China - Take the Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, for Example

Located in the Himalayan south extension of Yunnan garden has its specificity, because the element is very rich, tiancheng natural endowment objectively has "cast" the vivid "Chinese ink painting", "step for the scene, turned into", in the carved, in "painting" in "Yunnan garden", perfecting the connotation and extension creation process, is an economic phenomenon, also belongs to the cultural category, is the crystallization of collective wisdom in Yunnan, is constructing "Yunnan garden" system. It has been nearly 10 years since the end of 1990s. Over the past 10 years, relying on its own resource endowment, making use of the market and combining with the growing needs of Yunnan people for a "better life", Yunnan has created a unique "Yunnan School Garden". The 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 15) will be held in Kunming, China on October 11-24,2021, aiming to "formulate the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework". The conference is in line with the concept of "clear waters and green mountains are gold and silver mountains" under construction in China. Dian-style gardens practice biodiversity. On the occasion of the meeting, on the basis of analyzing the resource endowment of Yunnan province, this paper traces the growth process of "Yunnan School Garden" and puts forward the countermeasures and measures for development, which has far-reaching practical significance.

Based on the Development Countermeasures of Yunnan Garden in the Southwest Frontier of Honghe Prefecture

Located in the Himalayan south extension of Yunnan garden has its specificity, because the element is very rich, tiancheng natural endowment objectively has "cast" the vivid "Chinese ink painting", "move for the scene, turned into", in the carved, in "painting" in "Yunnan garden", perfecting the connotation and extension creation process, is an economic phenomenon, also belongs to the cultural category, is the crystallization of Yunnan collective wisdom, is constructing "Yunnan garden" system. Since the 1990s, relying on its own resource endowment, making use of the market and combining with the growing needs of Yunnan people for a "better life", Yunnan has created a unique "Yunnan School Garden". The 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 15) was held in Kunming, China on October 11-24, 2021. The conference is in line with the concept of "clear waters and green mountains are mountains of gold and silver" under construction in China. Dian-style gardens practice biodiversity. On the basis of analyzing the resource endowment of Yunnan, this paper traces the growth process of "Yunnan Garden" and puts forward the countermeasures and measures for development.

AUTOMATIC COLORIZATION OF CHINESE INK PAINTING COMBINING MULTI-LEVEL FEATURES AND GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORKS

Advanced Chinese ink painting also includes work-brush flower and bird paintings with brilliant colors, in contrast to traditional ink paintings that often only use water, ink, and black and white. This serves as the foundation for our investigation into a generalized transfer problem involving ink and wash, or an ink painting coloring problem. Our goal is to automatically colorize black and white ink paintings using deep neural networks. This study can serve as a guide for coloring ink paintings and broaden the range of applications for ink painting style transfer. The high-level semantic information and low-level local features of ink paintings cannot be successfully extracted using the current generalized style transfer approach (colorization algorithm). The resulting images have muddy borders and low color saturation. In order to improve the accuracy and coherence of the coloring of ink paintings, we build training by combining the global and local features of ink paintings with the achievements of generative adversarial networks already made in the field of colorization. Comparative and objective evaluations of the experimental portion are made using metrics like peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM), colorfulness, and user studies. Additionally, our approach beats the previous comparison approaches in terms of creative expression, color richness, and color overflow management.