A Study of the Thematic Imagery and Cultural Implications of Taohawu New Year Paintings from an Iconographic Perspective

Abstract

Taohuawu New Year paintings embody traditional spiritual culture and reflect the emotional needs of the people, occupying an important place in traditional Chinese art. This paper adopts an image-based approach to extract key image features from Taohuawu New Year paintings, including color histograms, SIFT-BoF features, and global contrast. Based on these results, a combined Corr-LDA model is employed to identify the probabilistic themes and cultural connotations of the New Year paintings. The results indicate that the average grayscale value in the color histogram of Taohuawu New Year paintings with the “warm/romantic” emotional theme is 0.04853, while those with the corresponding “festive/joyful” and “calm/relaxed” themes are 0.02932 and 0.00931, respectively. The thematic analysis of the New Year paintings yielded six probabilistic themes: folk life, agricultural activities, landscapes, supernatural beings, patterns, and opera. The most frequent keyword was “festival” under the folk life theme, with a frequency of 105. Taohuawu New Year paintings are a direct reflection of the aesthetic sensibilities of the common people and an intrinsic expression of national character and spiritual values.