Chinese Opera Character Painting Style Transfer: Using AI to Generate and Preserve Art

Chinese Opera characters ink painting, a distinctive blend of Chinese color ink painting and traditional opera, reflects the rich aesthetic heritage of Chinese culture. The advent of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) technology presents new opportunities for preserving and innovating this traditional art form. While style transfer techniques have been widely applied to Western art, the freehand style of Chinese ink painting remains under-explored. This paper fills this gap by constructing datasets of Chinese Opera character paintings through field visits and web crawling. This paper develops an automated system for transforming realistic opera character images into Chinese opera character paintings by leveraging generative adversarial networks (GAN) technology. The generated results prove that the GAN-based model is able to learn the key features of a style image and be able to distinguish the relationship between people in the image, it is better than an ordinary person with no foundation would draw. This research advances AI’s application in traditional art and provides a new thought to the preservation, dissemination, and modern reinterpretation of Chinese Opera characters ink painting.