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inconsistency of the written discourse—which often results from the use of arcane, metaphorical, or impressionistic language. In fact, many art historians and critics in traditional Chinese culture were fond of citing poems and especially tihuashi in their discourses.
Tihuashi started as a poetic genre that was physically separate from painting, but it eventually helped shape a genre of painting known as tishihua (painting inscribed with poems), which incorporates poems as calligraphic inscriptions into the pictorial space. This practice of tishihua caught on as a favorite pastime for the literati, thanks mainly to the promotion by Su Shi and Mi Fu (1052–1107). With this physical entry into the actual painting, tihuashi forms a signifying whole with the pictorial imagery; the verbal-visual integration and interaction thus realized not only enhance the visual appeal of the painting but also impart greater signifying power to it. The resulting symbiosis and synergy of the verbal and visual signs within the same signifying economy add another interartistic dimension to the poetics of tihuashi.
Through its congenial dialogue with painting,tihuashi has helped nurture a sisterly rapport between poetry and painting while also contributing to a total art integrating poetry, painting, calligraphy, and seal engraving. Along with the painterly genres of tishihua and shiyitu (painting rendering the ideas or themes of poems), tihuashihas fostered a heightened awareness among literati artists of the mutually inspiring and mutually enhancing power of poetry and painting, setting a fashion for these two arts to achieve ideational and formal unity. In so doing, it has helped advance Chinese literati art to its ultimate sophistication.
The cross-cultural and interartistic significance of tihuashi calls for more scholarly attention in Western academia. Although interartistic studies are gaining popularity in teaching as well as research, many important issues concerning the tradition and poetics of tihuashiand its many-faceted relationship with Chinese painting remain to be explored and elucidated. Just as the poetry-painting analogy is at once culture-bound and universal, so tihuashi (for all its cultural uniqueness) also invites comparison with ekphrastic poetry. The poets of tihuashi and their ekphrastic counterparts share a kindred spirit in pursuit of a medium that absorbs