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When Nam June Paik dipped his head in ink and “drew” a line at the Fluxus Festival in 1962, he didn’t just connect his experiments in performance art to Asian calligraphy. Paik’s Zen for Head called attention to the key role of bodily engagement in the Asian ink art tradition. In East Asian painting and calligraphy, the brush is regarded as an extension of the artist's body and mind. Noted calligrapher He Shaoji (1799-1873) remarked on the physical rigor of his process: "the energy of my whole body is concentrated in the fingers, and then I move my brush. I would be soaking wet with sweat before the work is even half finished." All the training and conditioning of the body goes into manipulating the brush into creating the “ink traces” that manifest the artist’s vision. But what happens when an artist discards the brush and creates art directly with their body? And how does the physical aspect factor into artistic practices and discourses on art?

This session invites papers that explore bodily engagement in the visual art of East Asia. Topics include but are not limited to finger painting and calligraphy and its intra-regional transmission; finger painting and calligraphy and its relationship with the artistic canon; discussions on the physical aspects of painting or writing; illness and disability and how they affect artistic practices; modern and contemporary forms of ink art that emphasizes bodily engagement.