| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Despite this delayed attainment of genre status by tihuashi, the theories of Six Dynasties artists (especially those of Gu Kaizhi, Zong Bing, Wang Wei, and Xie He) had a far-reaching influence on poets of later periods, providing them with an aesthetic context and conceptual framework in which to write their tihuashi-particularly those about landscape paintings. For example, Gu Kaizhi's formulation of yi xing xie shen (literally, depicting [inner] spirit through the portrayal of [outward] appearance) and Xie He's formulation of qiyun shengdong (roughly, spiritual consonance and lively movement) have since become the critical lingua francas as well as sine qua nons for poets and painters alike.31 Just as the Six Dynasties period was a turning point for painting as it began to approach the status of a liberal art, it was also a formative time for the full-fledged development of tihuashi.
Although few tihuashi were existent at that time in the strict sense, there was a significant number of yongwushi-a popular genre covering a variety of material objects and things (natural or man-made), including painting, which was classified as a handicraft rather than an art form at that time. In this sense, tihuashi is derived from yongwushi and can be considered a subgenre of the latter. In his “Self-introduction” to Yongwushi xuan, Yu Yan lauded this genre by tracing its origin to the Shi jing: