Material Natures: Local Terms, Practices, and the Articulation of Environment in Asian Art

This panel explores how artists across Asia have engaged with the concept of nature through locally rooted terms, practices, and epistemologies. Rather than treating “nature” as a universal or neutral category, we ask how culturally specific ways of knowing and relating to the environment have informed artistic production from the modern period to the present.

Artists across diverse Asian contexts have drawn on a range of frameworks—some grounded in Indigenous cosmologies, others shaped by religious, vernacular, or philosophical traditions—to conceptualize nature and the human place within it. These frameworks are not only visible in the materials artists choose—such as earth, wood, or fiber—but are also embedded in process: in ways of making that emphasize time, labor, ritual, or ecological attunement.

This panel invites papers that examine how such practices have shaped the form, meaning, and function of artworks. How have artists mobilized local terms or processes to visualize the environment? What kinds of knowledge are embedded in their work? And how might these practices prompt a reconsideration of dominant ecological paradigms in art history?