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In light of recent developments in environmental humanities and animal studies that underscore the mutual shaping of human actions, animal behaviors, and ecological contexts, calls to rethink the peripheral roles of non-human actors have gained increasing momentum in East Asian visual and material culture. Through both imagery and biological traces, non-human entities—including plants, animals, and microorganisms—permeate East Asian art, surfacing in picture fields, adorning object surfaces, inhabiting human bodies, and shaping architectural spaces. The interconnectedness of artists, mediums, and more-than-human life forms invites an interrogation of the anthropocentric frameworks shaping the field’s discursive practices. This panel investigates the implications of such cross-species encounters and entanglements, foregrounding the dynamic role of non-human agencies participate in shaping cultural imaginaries and ecological world-making. What insights, we ask, can East Asia art history offer into human-nonhuman interfaces, and the broader assemblages they form? In what ways might non-human entities have informed processes of knowledge production? To what extent does examining a matrix of material conditions surrounding non-human agents enable us to uncover a multitude of perspectives of flora, fauna, and micro beings? How were these perspectives woven into sociocultural transactions that were specific and interlinked? Presentations on this panel address enquires as diverse as the challenges posed by microscopic living materials to the privileged human identity, depictions of the azure ox as apotropaic agency in the tomb space, the contested relation between knowledge formation and artistic conventions in bird-and-flower paintings, and the incorporation of kingfisher feathers in jewellry crafting.