Aesthetic experience of street art: Cross-cultural studies in Poland and Hong Kong

Street art refers to contemporary artworks that are created for showing in public space. A cultural perspective has been scarce in the research on the aesthetic experience of street art. This study investigates whether European and Asian viewers appreciate differentially graffiti murals originated from across the West and the East.

Participants were college students without previous or current art education from Lublin (n = 97) and Hong Kong (n = 91). We intended to examine how their aesthetic experiences could vary as a function of four variables: art origin (West vs. East), period (contemporary vs. historical), medium (wall vs. canvas), and viewer’s background (European vs. Asian). They viewed 16 x 2 origins x 2 periods x 2 media = 128 artworks on a computer screen, one by one in a randomized order. They evaluated each artwork in terms of art classification, understanding, and liking; they also reported their interests and experts in contemporary art and the visual arts.

Repeated measures ANOVAs revealed significant four-way interactions in all three DVs, suggesting that aesthetic experiences behave differentially across cultures (as manifested by art origin and viewer’s background) for different artwork types (as manifested by period and medium). Follow-up repeated measures ANOVAs focusing on graffiti murals (period = contemporary, medium = wall) revealed significant two-way interactions in all three DVs, suggesting that viewers of different cultural backgrounds differ in appreciating graffiti murals from different cultural origins.

Specifically, Polish participants classified the Western graffiti murals as art more than the Eastern ones, whereas Hong Kong participants did not classify Western and Eastern graffiti murals as art differentially. Similarly, Polish participants understood the Western graffiti murals more than the Eastern ones, whereas Hong Kong participants did not understand Western and Eastern graffiti murals differentially. Finally, both Polish and Hong Kong participants liked the Western graffiti murals more than the Eastern ones. In a nutshell, Polish viewers tend to appreciate Western and Eastern graffiti murals differentially, whereas Hong Kong viewers tend not to do so.

Additional analyses showed that, in comparison with the Polish participants, the Hong Kong participants reported significantly higher interests and experts in both contemporary art and the visual arts. That might help explain the current interactions. Raised in an internationalized city, Hong Kong people might be generally more receptive than Polish people to contemporary art and visual arts including both Western and Eastern street art.