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An alternative character-word for ti that avoids ambiguity is lun (or its synonym ping), which means explicitly “to critique” (or “to comment on”), whether or not the poetic critique—known as lunhuashi (poetry critiquing painting)—is actually inscribed on the source painting. To this day, the exact definition of tihuashi remains a subject of debate, as contemporary scholars in China have proposed varied criteria for this genre.7 In this book, the term tihuashi is taken sometimes to refer to a single genre and, at other times, to actual poems. The verbs change to agree with whichever sense in which it is being used.
Historically, before tihuashi came to be treated more or less as an independent genre in traditional Chinese literature, poems written about paintings were placed under the broad rubric of yongwushi (literally, poetry written about material objects or things), which was quite a poetic vogue during the Six Dynasties period (220–589). There are also nonpoetic literary genres related to painting, including huaming (epitaph complementing painting), huazan (eulogy complementing painting), huaba (postscript or colophon about painting), and huaji (notes on painting). Huaming and huazan, which existed as early as the Han period (206 BC–AD 220), are closer to prose than to poetry in terms of their mode of representation, despite their siyan (literally, four-character-a-line) form. Huaba, which came into practice during the Six Dynasties period, is a shorter and more casual form than huaji and is usually inscribed on the source painting. Huaji appeared slightly later, during the Tang period (618–907), as a subgenre under the prose genre of zajiwen (notes on miscellanies).
As an interartistic genre, tihuashi relates to almost all genres of painting, and individual poems from this genre can be classified in accordance with the genres of the source paintings or their own thematic concerns—such as the representation (or re-creation) of painterly scenes (or things associated with source paintings), the appraisal of painterly artistry or personality, or the expression of poetic sentiment inspired by paintings. In many cases, multiple subjects are woven into a thematic whole within a single piece. Some tihuashi overlap with regular poems in theme or subject matter and thus bear cross-genre implications. For example, a tihuashi about a landscape painting may overlap with a regular landscape