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component of literati art, tihuashi embodies the holistic values unique to traditional Chinese aesthetics, in which interartistic mutuality and unity are of central significance.
Adopting painting as its subject or subject matter, tihuashi addresses many aspects of Chinese painting, including the origin and evolution of certain genres and schools, brushwork techniques, and painting materials. Some tihuashi may be used as frames of reference for verifying the authenticity of existing paintings of dubious authorship or provenance or to provide valuable clues to lost paintings whose original format and content remain undetermined. Thus, tihuashi not only serves as a nonprose component of Chinese art criticism but also plays a documentary role in Chinese art history. It is still a matter of debate, however, as to whether tihuashi is a suitable form of art criticism. Commenting on the poem “A Song of Painting” by the Song scholar Shen Kuo (1030–1094), which discusses various schools and genres of painting, Yu Jianhua (1895–1979) expressed his concern over poetry’s ineffectiveness at critiquing painting:
Yu’s concern points to the inherent limitations of tihuashi in serving the purpose of art criticism, as he believed the verse form tends to hamper rather than facilitate the formulation of critical thinking about art. Despite that, tihuashi remains a worthy complement to formal Chinese art criticism and art history. To some extent, traditional Chinese scholarship itself in these two areas is marred by obscurity, ambiguity, and