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This panel considers how embodied and material practices of marking, layering, and caretaking imagine contingent worlds forged in the aftermath of colonial violence, displacement, and erasure. How have Asian diasporic artists reconfigured ritual practices as a mode of historical encounter, not to reconcile historical violence but to remain in intimate relation with its ongoing reverberations? How have abstraction and conceptualism engendered perceptual reconfigurations of racial and geographic contingencies that intervene in western frameworks?

While Carlos Villa’s palimpsestic Tatu series, the caretaking of Chinese American heritage sites, and the scarification practices by Asian American sex workers trace how artists activate ritual and embodied knowledge, Leo Valledor’s spatial experiments and the haunted immaterialities of Matsuzawa Yutaka’s conceptualism center Buddhist and occult worldviews—imagining new solidarities, lineages, and futures. This panel opens conversations on ritual and relation as method and metaphor for remapping the epistemological terrain of transpacific history, material inheritance, and cultural memory.