Computational Approaches for Traditional Chinese Painting:
From the "Six Principles of Painting" Perspective
Introduction Overview Paper Browser

About

Originating from the Han Dynasty, Traditional Chinese Painting (TCP) has been a primary art form in China, characterized by artistic expressions depicted on paper and silk with brushes dipped in black ink and Chinese pigments. TCP has been used to express the author's artistic creativity and to insinuate criticism of the society, philosophy, and politics of the time. Existing studies on TCP mainly focus on its history, explanation, and appreciation of paintings, as well as various styles and techniques. However, these are typically conducted thorough a close-reading and case study approach based on painting theories, which while insightful, is time-consuming and unscalable for studying the patterns and evolution trends of TCP that have emerged over the centuries.

Corpus

We constructed a literature corpus based on keyword and relation-search methods. We focused on TCP-related keywords (.eg ``Chinese landscape painting'', ``Chinese ink wash painting'', and ``Chinese brush painting''), resulting in an initial 88 papers. To enlarge our literature corpus, we further used the relation-search method. We identified eight influential papers from the initial corpus and exhaustively traversed their references and citations, which expanded the corpus to 112 papers. We thoroughly assessed the corpus based on relevance, focusing on publications that probe methodologies and applications. Papers on theory and evaluation were excluded. Despite extensive research on brushes, we only included those relevant to TCP, discarding the calligraphy-related articles. Finally, the corpus comprised 92 papers.

Overview

  The Six Principles of Painting   were proposed in the sixth century to serve as the grading standards of TCP. They have remained influential to this day in some of the most important considerations for drawing and appreciating TCP. Due to their extreme importance, we were inspired to employ the Six Principles as a coding scheme to examine the focused topics of recent literature. We selected the translations collected in to clarify these principles in the following sections.

  Computational Techniques   We discussed computational techniques applied to TCPs. Compared with natural images, TCPs are similar in the modality of pictures yet different in technique details for understanding and creation. We organize the techniques from three perspectives as follows: What tasks are the computational techniques used for? How does the model extract features for these tasks? How does the model render the newly generated paintings?

  Analytical Framework   We proposed a framework of applying computational techniques in TCPs based on the state-of-the-art and domain experts. The framework involves four typical stages, from the digitalization and interpretation of existing paintings, to the creation of new artworks. These three stages will also serve the purpose of exhibition. We discussed computational techniques applied to TCPs. Compared with natural images, TCPs are similar in the modality of pictures yet different in technique details for understanding and creation. We organize the techniques from three perspectives as follows: What tasks are the computational techniques used for？ How does the model extract features for these tasks? How does the model render the newly generated paintings?