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Buddhism rejects, doctrinally, the fixity of physical constants. Consequently, objects and images made in service to the faith often likewise refuse to adhere to traditionally understood material affordances. As Buddhism took root and developed in East Asia during the medieval period, artists began to explore how they might visualize Buddhist concepts like immateriality and impermanence, infinity and multiplicity – frameworks that not only challenged the conventions of ordinary representation but also stimulated new modes of artistic innovation. The resulting works reveal how early Buddhist communities in East Asia imagined stone as transparent, bronze as aqueous, wood as fleshy, and painted surfaces as permeable.

Through a selection of case studies from across East Asia, this panel aims to explore Buddhist theories of materiality and, in doing so, demonstrate how Buddhism functioned not merely as a religious basis for image-making, but as a generative force for the creation of new visualities through material and iconographic experimentation. We are particularly interested in how artists made visible the unstable and protean nature of matter, questioned the boundaries between form and formlessness, or used conventional materials in unexpected ways to produce effects of revelation, transcendence, or immanence.

Art historians have shown how surface motifs in cave shrines allowed devotees to see through stone, or how the surfaces of votive sculpture acted as traversable membranes through which Buddhas and bodhisattvas might manifest in the human world. We invite proposals that explore similar questions of transparency, permeability, and material reimagining across diverse media, sites, and regional contexts.