Holistic thinking

One of the most notable differences between Eastern and Western societies is their perspective towards visual arts.

A-D drawn by American participants. E-H by East Asian participants.

This tendency has persisted throughout history. Researchers have analyzed the landscape drawings and portrait photographs of East Asians and Westerners and found a distinguishable pattern. Ancient East Asian artists used to draw the horizon higher than their Western counterparts. The study also revealed that Asian drawings contained more contextual objects than Western images, indicating that East Asians have a more holistic approach. Similarly, the size of the person in East Asian portraits was smaller than in Western portraits, which means that Asian portraits had more environmental information.

The study concluded that East Asians use contextual information at the expense of the figure in the scene.

The researchers also found that East Asians were more likely to set the zoom function to make the model small and the context large while taking photographs.

Another study compared the drawings of Canadian and Japanese children and found that Japanese children placed the horizon significantly higher than Canadian kids in all grades of primary school.

The number of objects in Japanese drawings was also higher. The study found that the higher placement of the horizon is linked to the context-oriented visual attention style seen in adults’ drawings and historical paintings in East Asian cultures, as opposed to object-focused drawing styles seen in North American cultures.