The invention belongs to the technical field of modern art design, and discloses a system and a method for analyzing the representation of Chinese traditional elements in modern art design. The systemfor analyzing the representation of the Chinese traditional elements in the modern art design comprises a design drawing acquisition module, a main control module, an image feature extraction module,a matching module, a classification module, a retrieval module, an analysis module and a display module. Pictures are classified and stored through the classification module according to different numbers of the pictures, so that the classification efficiency of the design drawing is greatly improved; Meanwhile, a Gram matrix is used as an operator for describing image style characteristics through a retrieval module; style characteristics of all training samples of a given design image set are extracted, an image index is constructed, style characteristics of a to-be-detected image are extracted, an index number of the image with the highest similarity with the to-be-detected image is searched, and a similar image set is returned according to the index number, so that retrieval of the abstract image is realized through the method, and the method has the advantages of simplicity and high retrieval efficiency.