Chinese poetics can be examined along with its underlying cultural and aesthetic values.
As an interartistic genre, ekphrastic poetry derives its name from the notion of ekphrasis, commonly defined as “the verbal representation of visual representation.”4 Engaging and addressing visual art creations, this genre embodies the interaction and negotiation between verbal and visual signs and is capable of performing various tasks, as described by J. D. McClatchy:
Similar tasks are performed by tihuashi, despite the differences in poetics between these two genres. As an intertextual genre, ekphrastic poetry rises to the challenge of demonstrating how poetic texts “speak to, for, or about works of visual art.”6 Arising from the lyrical resonance between poets and painters,tihuashi re-presents painterly texts in an echo of visual creation while blending in poets’ own imaginations in the process.
Before the tradition and poetics of tihuashi is introduced, the term itself should first be explained. The Chinese character-word ti, when used in the term tihuashi, means either “to write about” or “to inscribe on” (Hua means “painting”; shi means “poem,” “poems,” or “poetry.”). Thus, tihuashi may refer to poems that represent individual paintings or at the same time may go further to critique them along with the painters, though such poems may not necessarily be inscribed on the source paintings. This term may also refer to poems inscribed on paintings, which may be inspired by or bear a textual or subtextual association with those paintings but may not be thematically related to the painterly texts.