Visual representation of cross-cultural adaptation in Nanyang style of painting: a semiotic analysis of Georgette Chen’s Family Portrait

The Nanyang art style, as a product of a specific era, is an artist’s response strategy to identity negotiation. Among many early Nanyang painters, Georgette Chen is one of the most representative figures of her time. The visual content presented in her oil painting Family Portrait created in 1954–1955, provides us with concrete visual information about the process of cross-cultural adaptation. In this study, we focused on the cross-cultural adaptation implications of the visual representation of the work in the historical context of Malaya. To address this issue, a conceptual framework was constructed, combining Peirce’s semiotics, Kim’s cross-cultural adaptation theory, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to identify icons, indices, and symbols in the work. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provides a psychological perspective for interpreting how visual representations of family roles, spatial arrangements, and everyday activities reflect deeper motivations related to belonging, identity, and cultural adaptation. We found that the co-existence of Chinese and Western clothing, the visualisation of female subjects, and the imitation of children’s culture in the painting constitute visual strategies for family members to negotiate their identities and make cultural choices in the context of cultural transfer. These symbols do not only reflect the individual’s psychological adaptation process but also represent the cultural adaptation path within the family between tradition and modernity. In addition, the symbols (signs) in the work essentially reflect the cultural negotiation results in daily life, revealing the practical implications of cross-cultural adaptation in immigrant families. The conceptual framework constructed in this study expands the path of understanding the social significance of Southeast Asian painting styles and provides a new methodological perspective for the analysis of Southeast Asian Chinese culture and visual arts research.