2026/07/29 by Dekun Qian, Ruiqi Yu, Li Ye +6
Computer Science · #cs.HC #cs.GR
arxiv created 2026/07/29 · arxiv updated 2026/07/31
Compositional analysis of Traditional Chinese Paintings (TCPs) reveals how spatial arrangement, narrative structure, and cultural-aesthetic meaning are organized within the pictorial field. Traditional compositional analysis relies primarily on qualitative interpretation, supporting close examination of individual paintings but offering limited capacity to identify, compare, and validate compositional patterns across large-scale collections. To identify the key challenges in analyzing composition across large TCP collections, we collaborated with two art historians and conducted a complementary literature review. Drawing on the resulting insights, we introduce CompoGraph, a structured representation for composition-oriented analysis of TCPs. It represents the composition of a painting across four layers: entities, relations, voids, and context. Based on this representation, we develop CompoVista, a canvas-based visual analytics system for composition-oriented exploration of TCPs. CompoVista allows art historians to construct and refine painting cohorts through interactive compositional queries. It also supports inspecting entity distributions and relations at the cohort level, comparing compositional differences across cohorts, and tracing aggregate patterns back to painting-level evidence. Through two case studies, a user study, and expert interviews, we demonstrate that CompoVista can help art historians discover, compare, and validate compositional patterns across collections of TCPs.