AI-mediated cross-cultural translation of Chinese brush-and-ink psychology for aesthetic empathy.

The brush-and-ink system of Chinese painting is a systematic psychological symbol system deeply rooted in Confucian, Dao, and Chan, where lines, ink tones, and composition, respectively, embody painters' personality traits, emotional states, and mental patterns. In the context of global digital communication, it faces the dilemma of "visual accessibility but psychological inaccessibility," mainly due to the obvious East-West cultural-psychological aesthetic gap that seriously hinders Western audiences' ability to empathize with its implicit psychological connotations. Existing relevant studies mostly focus on the adaptation of visual forms or the simple implementation of AI technology, thus lacking a systematic research framework for the cross-cultural psychological translation of brush-and-ink psychology. Based on cultural psychology and cross-cultural communication theories, this study systematically analyzes the brush-and-ink psychological symbol system, dissects the core differences in East-West aesthetic psychology, and explores AI's effectiveness in cross-cultural psychological translation across three critical facets: intelligent decoding, visual adaptation, and immersive experience extension. Furthermore, it constructs a three-dimensional pathway model of "brush-and-ink psychology - AI translation - aesthetic empathy," identifies the core challenges in AI translation practice, and proposes targeted optimization strategies. As an exploratory theoretical research article, this research reveals AI's core mechanism in bridging cross-cultural aesthetic psychological barriers, fills the existing research gaps, and provides a replicable theoretical and practical model for the international dissemination of Chinese painting's brush-and-ink psychology and other non-Western art forms.