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Aesthetic evaluation of Chinese calligraphy: a cross-cultural comparative study

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Abstract

Investigations of non-Western art forms and non-Western subjects are needed to understand cross-cultural empirical aesthetics. This study examined the aesthetic evaluation of Chinese calligraphy, a distinguished visual art in East Asia, through people’s preferences among five scripts. These scripts are representative of major artistic writing styles of Chinese characters. We conducted an experiment with Chinese (mean age = 22.64, SD = 2.90) and non-Chinese participants (International students from Asia, Africa, and Northern America; mean age = 26.76, SD = 2.35) and investigated through subjective measures and eye-tracking measures. We adopted Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic Liking (PIA Model) and measured fluency processing, affective feelings, motivational evaluation, and overall likeness as subjective measures to capture the aesthetic evaluation. The two groups evaluated the scripts differently and showed distinctive preferences for scripts. Chinese participants perceived the stimuli to be more fluent than non-Chinese participants. Chinese rated cursive script most fluent, pleasant, interesting, and liked it most, whereas non-Chinese liked the official script the most and rated it most interesting. Regarding eye movement, Chinese participants had fewer fixations and shorter total fixation durations, relative to non-Chinese participants. Non-Chinese participants were more sensitive to the features of the scripts compared with Chinese participants. We suggest that culture could affect aesthetic evaluation of Chinese calligraphy. Experience of Chinese characters and aesthetic expectations of different cultures may contribute to the evaluation differences.

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The study has been reviewed and approved by School Ethnic Board.

Notes

  1. Five non-Chinese participants had learned a few Chinese characters. Eight participants reported recognition of one or more characters, including: “如” (by five participants), “门” (by three participants), and “食”, “字”, “风”, and “深” (by one or two participants).

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71902113].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dong Chuan Road, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Yi Xu

  2. Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Ruoci Shen

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Appendices

Appendix 1 Character stimulus

Table 4

Table 4 Details of 10 selected characters
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Appendix 2 Repeated measures multiple analysis of variance for subjective measures

Table 5

Table 5 Repeated measures multiple analysis of variance for subjective measures
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Appendix 3 Repeated Measures Multiple Analysis of Variance for Eye Movement Measures

Table 6

Table 6 Repeated measures multiple analysis of variance for eye movement measures
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Xu, Y., Shen, R. Aesthetic evaluation of Chinese calligraphy: a cross-cultural comparative study. Curr Psychol 42, 23096–23109 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03390-7

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