What is it about?
Great artworks attract physicists in a peculiar way. If a painting contains wave and swirls, some fluid dynamicists cannot help but analyze them with present-day tools developed for real flows in nature and mechanical systems. Why? Because they believe that what makes an artwork outstanding is its ability to capture intuitively the laws of nature. Recently, researchers found hints of this in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In this paper we turn to Ogata Korin's Red and White Plum Blossoms, a master piece of the Japanese art in the 18th century. Using modern techniques, we discover that the artwork not only reflects the basic scaling law of turbulent flow, but also exhibits intermittency --- a subtle and advanced feature of turbulence associated with erratic fluctuations across scales. This suggests that the painting embodies, quite remarkably, both the aesthetic and statistical essence of turbulence, long before such laws were scientifically established.
Featured Image
Photo by Alexander Hipp on Unsplash
Why is it important?
It has long been observed in vision science that many photographs and images, even those unrelated to fluids, can show characteristics that resemble turbulent flow. When analyzing the brightness levels (luminance) of various natural scenes, researchers often find power-law behavior in their spectral characteristics, similar to what is known in real turbulence (Kolmogorov spectrum). This means that matching the basic spectral scaling law alone is not strong evidence that an artwork captures the physics of turbulence. That kind of agreement could be coincidental. To address this limitation, we applied a more advanced analytical tool known as the structure function to Red and White Plum Blossoms. This method is commonly used in turbulence research to detect finer statistical features, especially intermittency, the hallmark of turbulence, where fluctuations become increasingly erratic at smaller scales. Remarkably, our analysis found that the structure functions derived from the artwork closely match those of real turbulent flows, including clear signs of intermittency. While the physical origin of intermittency is still not fully understood in fluid dynamics, its presence in this 18th-century painting invites reflection whether it arose from material properties of the painting or from the artist’s uncanny intuition of nature’s hidden laws.
Perspectives
We must mention here that we analyzed not only the swirls in the river of Red and White Plum Blossoms, but also the plum tree part prompted by a thoughtful referee. Both parts show consistency with real turbulent flow. The agreement of the tree part indicates that the painting techinique (known as tarasikomi) may give rise to a turbulent mixing locally. But this is in turn suggestive for the techinique used for the river part, which remains less understood. We believe that, rather than diminishing the artistic achievement, this line of inquiry deepens it. It suggests that traditional artistic methods -- intuitive, tactile, and centuries old -- may have naturally embodied complex physical processes, long before those processes were formally described by science. This intersection of technique, material behavior, and emergent structure offers a rich direction for future interdisciplinary exploration.
Takeshi Matsumoto
Kyoto university
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Turbulent scaling law in Ogata Kōrin's Red and White Plum Blossoms, Physics of Fluids, March 2025, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0259486.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
