A Comparative Study of the Perspective and the Three Distances in Painting -focusing on the Way of Seeing-

John Berger's Ways of Seeing links the way of seeing with vision, emphasizing the significance of the viewer in the act of seeing. The perspective and the Three Distances not only serve as methodologies for shaping the visual space of images but also reflect distinct observational approaches and cognitive paradigms of the world within different cultural contexts. In art appreciation, the viewer, as the active subject of seeing, is an indispensable existence in the construction of artistic meaning. Based on the above analysis, this study aims to compare the differences in seeing methods between perspective and three-distance in paintings from the viewer's perspective. In the Renaissance era, the emergence of perspective changed the way people saw. Painters used perspective to reproduce the three-dimensional world in two-dimensional images, and the viewer saw the image rationally and objectively above the picture. The eyes were the center of the world, and there was no spiritual interaction. The Three Distances has another way of seeing. Under the influence of Zhuangzi's aesthetics and Northern Song Neo Confucianism(理學), literati of the Northern Song Dynasty regarded the landscape space in painting as a habitat for their inner spirit. The fluid perspective of the three distances allowed people to freely observe, not just visually recognizing the image space, but experiencing the space with the participation of their inner spirit. In terms of research methods, this study first adopts the method of literature research to elaborate on the background of the formation of the perspective and the three distances theory, reveal the factors that affect the way of seeing, and compare Western European traditional landscape paintings and Northern Song landscape paintings with similar themes. Finally, the analysis results show that perspective is a seeing method based on the opposition between subject and object using a fixed viewpoint. The Three Distances is a seeing method that uses a fluid perspective based on the unity of subject and object.