| Chapter : | Introduction |
In describing his experience of converting this poem into painting, Gu Kaizhi pointed out the difficulty of rendering the persona's eye expressions. He was quoted as saying, "'My hand sweeps across the five strings on the lute' is easy [to render], but 'My eyes follow the homebound wild geese' is hard [to render]."45 With his shrewd discernment of the inherent limitations of shiyitu, Gu was probably the first artist in Chinese history to touch upon interartistic poetics. Inspired by his effort at poetry-painting conversion in theory and praxis, many later poets continued to explore the verbal-visual relationship, expressing and sharing their perspectives in tihuashi. Thanks to their labors of love and love of leisure, the tradition and poetics of tihuashi took shape.