The Chinese calligraphy is a unique art of traditional Chinese culture. The core of color preference for Chinese calligraphy is figural preference, which is a special kind of color combination preference. Currently, the exhibition of calligraphy is always lack of scientific basis in the aspect of color science. In this research, the influence of light sources and paper color on the preference of traditional calligraphy was analyzed based on subjective and objective experiments. The relative spectral power distribution of 5 typical light sources (correlated color temperature: 2 500, 3 500, 4 500, 5 500 and 6 500 K) and spectral reflectance of 5 typical Chinese rice papers (white, orange, light white, red, yellow-white) were firstly measured and then transformed into CIEXYZ and CIECAM02 color space, respectively. Subsequently, the correlation between those colors attributes and 1 000 series of psychophysical experiment data from 40 observers on calligraphy exhibiting preference was analyzed. At last, the influence factors of the correlation were discussed form a multiple statistical point of view, such as normal distribution, correlation analysis and multiple regression. The experimental results indicated that the exhibiting preference of Chinese calligraphy is obviously different with that of ordinary color preference cases, for it is mainly affected by the attributes of lighting sources instead of the contrast of hue and lightness. The authors believe that the finding of the research will provided effective support for the development of calligraphy exhibiting in near future for museums and gallaries.