Abstract: The academic world has been utilizing modern western semiotics to interpret art for a long time, mainly focusing on art history and art criticism as well as ontology research of Western painting. There are only a few interpretations and researches on traditional Chinese painting. As a painting geezer in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, Chen Hongshou has left a large number of figures, flowers and birds, and landscape paintings for the world. His works are of a unique style and enjoy a high reputation in the history of Chinese and foreign art. To some extent, his painting works have many similarities with the theory of "three Symbols and three Terms" (icon, index, symbol, representamen, interpretant, object) put forward by American semiotician Pierce. Based on Pierce's semiotics, this paper makes an in-depth analysis and interpretation of Chen Hongshou's paintings from the aspects of similar function, indicative function and stipulation function, in order to help us understand Chen Hongshou's painting language from a new perspective and better interpret the schema connotation of Chinese painting represented by Chen Hongshou.

Key words: Pierce, semiotics, Chinese painting, schema connotation, Chen Hongshou's paintings