Large vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in understanding everyday content. However, their performance in the domain of art, particularly culturally rich art forms, remains less explored. As a pearl of human wisdom and creativity, art encapsulates complex cultural narratives and symbolism. In this paper, we offer the Pun Rebus Art Dataset, a multimodal dataset for art understanding deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. We focus on three primary tasks: identifying salient visual elements, matching elements with their symbolic meanings, and explanations for the conveyed messages. Our evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art VLMs struggle with these tasks, often providing biased and hallucinated explanations and showing limited improvement through in-context learning. By releasing the Pun Rebus Art Dataset, we aim to facilitate the development of VLMs that can better understand and interpret culturally specific content, promoting greater inclusiveness beyond English-based corpora. DOWNLOAD PDF

At the intersection of contemporary art, the comparison between composite photography and AI-generated image has sparked profound reflection for Cao Mengqin. Since first exhibiting "photomontage" in 2020, the artist has gradually realized the challenges AI technology poses to traditional art forms while exploring the authenticity of images and creative intent. Through an in-depth analysis of a work titled Xiling Scroll, the artist not only examines the visual logic and artistic expression of the image but also reflects on the limitations and possibilities of AI within the creative process.

"Light of Sumeru" was originally a "false shot" in the eyes of Cao Mengqin. However, in a sudden burst of inspiration, calligrapher Zhang Chong used the directness of text to imbue the objects within the photograph with new meaning. Their mutual understanding brought this work to life, and it now stands as a testament to the friendship between the two. In addition to this collaboration with Zhang Chong, Cao Mengqin has also formed the photography duo Fang-Mengqin with photographer Fang Xiaohe.