Reconsidering Pavilions as Visual Focal Points: An Eye-Tracking Study of Viewing Behaviour in Classical Chinese Garden Paintings

Chinese garden painting traditions have long emphasised the compositional importance of pavilions and have often treated them as visual focal points. However, whether a compositional focal point also becomes a focus of viewers’ attention during actual viewing remains an open question. This exploratory study examines five pavilion scenes from Forty Views of the Yuanmingyuan by combining historical plan reconstruction, compositional analysis, eye tracking, and post-viewing questionnaires. Thirty participants viewed the paintings while fixation timing, order, duration, and frequency were recorded. Across most scenes, pavilions were not the first elements to attract attention and generally received less cumulative attention than vegetation, topography, or larger architectural groups. Their visual prominence varied with spatial position, scale, and relationships with paths, water, terrain, and surrounding buildings. Across scenes, pavilion fixation probability and time to first fixation did not differ significantly, whereas total fixation-duration proportion and fixation count did; JJMQ exceeded each of the other four scenes on both cumulative measures. The findings suggest that pavilions function not as fixed visual centres but as conditional nodes of attention whose observed salience was associated with spatial relationships and pictorial composition in the five scenes examined.