Spatiotemporal organization and visual experience: a narrative methodological study of song dynasty paintings

Narrative inquiry progressively breaks beyond the boundaries of linguistic texts, with visual images serving as important vehicles for encoding experience and constructing meaning, thereby making image-based narrative a new frontier in the field of narrative psychology. However, mainstream narrative methods still rely heavily on oral and textual materials, lacking standardized, reproducible qualitative-analytic frameworks for nonlinguistic visual texts such as traditional painting; existing painting studies are often limited to affective descriptions in art history or cultural interpretation, neglecting the psychological structures of the internal organization of visual experience. This study, focusing on Song Dynasty painting, explores the application of narrative analysis to nonlinguistic visual art. By transforming representative paintings and historical documents into structured visual-narrative texts, the study establishes a multidimensional coding system that encompasses spatial hierarchies, narrative nodes, viewing trajectories, and visual expressions. The findings indicate: (1) Song Dynasty painting constructs a stable narrative architecture of "spatiotemporal coordination" through the deep coupling of foreground, middle ground, and negative space; (2) viewing trajectories serve as a crucial structural link between spatial organization and narrative unfolding, allowing static images to be analyzed as continuous visual-narrative structures. (3) Visual-expression strategies such as ink wash and blue-green organize visual focalization, narrative rhythm, and focal rhythm, contributing to the organization of visual experience and the construction of narrative meaning. The study systematically develops a spatiotemporal-coordinated visual-narrative analysis framework tailored to traditional painting, facilitating the transition from aesthetic interpretation of images to standardized narrative-psychology analysis. Consequently, This research expands the applicability of narrative methods to nonlinguistic visual texts and provides traditional Eastern art as a case study for a psychology-oriented study of visual narrative and cross-cultural experience.