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From relief sculpture in cave temples, to abstract paintings and calligraphy by contemporary artists, the unfinished as an aesthetic choice has recurred in East Asian art across times. As Vidya Dehejia and Peter Rockwell have argued, the aesthetic category of “finish” is a malleable concept that is predicated on social and historical conventions. This panel therefore invites papers that examine unfinished works in East Asia from ancient to contemporary times, as well as from a broad range of contexts. In particular, the panel asks: what factors determined the perimeters of refinement and fineness in East Asian art, and the reception of the incomplete? What purposes did unfinished works serve, and what kinds of discursive devices were deployed by artists or critics to justify that? How to theorize the unfinished in light of the traditions of emulation in literati art, sketching in court ateliers, or ritual efficacy in religious contexts? To what extent were unfinished works iconoclastic by challenging the judgement of taste, canons, and institutional practices? How did the unfinished complicate our understanding of labor, time, and the obligation of meaning in art? Taken together, how is one to reconceive a history of East Asian art when the unfinished entails not a disruption but a reassertion of creative agency? And how does the case of the unfinished speak to the practice of art history, a discipline that often preoccupies itself with unity, wholeness, and technical fineness?