Aesthetic comparison between Chinese landscape painting and figure epainting: an exploration based on information acquisition

Abstract Chinese painting is renowned for its unique artistic expression, and includes distinct types such as landscape painting and figure painting, each with a unique compositional style. Landscape painting emphasizes natural scenery, while figure painting centers on human characters. While both genres reflect profound cultural values, their aesthetic experiences may differ due to differences in information processing. This study investigates how processing fluency influences aesthetic experiences for the Chinese painting using eye-movement experiments. In Experiment 1, compared with figure painting, landscape painting lacks clear focal stimuli, and more attention resources need to be dispersed for visual exploration, resulting in lower processing fluency and lower aesthetic experience score. In Experiment 2, the eye-movement hot-spot map showed that the figure paintings caused participants to pay more attention to the figure, supporting the Western concept of “figure priority” in attentional allocation. Experiment 2 further manipulated processing fluency by comparing landscape paintings, figure paintings with background, and figure paintings without background. The results showed that artworks with higher visual complexity (e.g. landscapes paintings) imposed greater cognitive load, resulting in lower processing fluency and poorer aesthetic experience score. Conversely, simplified compositions (e.g. figure paintings without background) enhanced fluency and aesthetic experience. These findings underscore processing fluency as a critical factor in aesthetic experiences, highlighting the impact of compositional complexity on aesthetics. The study bridges Western cognitive theories and Eastern artistic traditions, offering insights into the universality and specificity of aesthetic perception.