Traditional Chinese painting (TCP), culturally significant, reflects China’s rich history and aesthetics. In recent years, TCP classification has shown impressive performance, but obtaining accurate annotations for these tasks is time-consuming and expensive, involving professional art experts. To address this challenge, we present a semi-supervised learning (SSL) method for traditional painting classification, achieving exceptional results even with a limited number of labels. To improve global representation learning, we employ the self-attention-based MobileVit model as the backbone network. Furthermore, We present a data augmentation strategy, Random Brushwork Augment (RBA), which integrates brushwork to enhance the performance. Comparative experiments confirm the effectiveness of TCP-RBA in Chinese painting classification, demonstrating outstanding accuracy of 88.27% on the test dataset, even with only 10 labels, each representing a single class.