Monkeys and apes appear across premodern East Asian cultures, populating textual and visual narratives and shaping daily, spiritual, and imaginative worlds. This panel brings together interdisciplinary approaches—from literary and religious studies to fashion, animal, and performance studies—to examine how artisans, authors, and artists thought with and through simian figures in early modern China, Japan, and Korea. Much of the existing scholarship on this topic focuses exclusively on Chinese sources, and thus our project is groundbreaking in its East Asian scope. Papers will be circulated beforehand, and each presenter will speak for fifteen minutes and will then act as discussants of the main issues emerging from our interdisciplinary and transnational approach. We plan to each offer up to three critical questions for conversations with our audience, who will also have access to our papers as of 12/1/2026. By engaging overlapping materials and methodologies, our papers highlight shared imaginaries, editorial and artistic interventions, and the fluid boundaries between beings. To foster deeper collective inquiry, panelists will serve as each other’s discussants, circulating papers in advance to enable a rich and focused conversation.

William Hedberg, in his paper What Can Non-Chronological Comparison Tell Us About Perfect Language and Perfected Monkeys?, focuses on the controversy over the origins of Sun Wukong, the monkey-king protagonist of Xiyouji. The long-standing and often heated discussion revolves around the question of whether the spotlight-stealing sidekick Sun Wukong is derived from the similarly charismatic figure of Hanumān in the Indian Rāmāyaṇa narrative. In light of recent attempts within the environmental humanities to de-center human language from its hierarchical position and resituate it within an egalitarian network of eco-utterances, we will explore the simian protagonists of Xiyouji and Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa negotiate linguistic meaning, and the ways in which epistemological boundaries between the human and non-human are ultimately dissolved in the quest for transcendent paradigms.

Barbara Wall, in her paper From Pilgrim to Palace Roof: The Monkey King as Roof Ornament 雜像 in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) traces the Monkey King’s unexpected ascent into the symbolic center of Chosŏn authority: the rooftops of Korean royal palaces. By examining textual references alongside architectural practices, this paper argues that the Monkey King’s presence on palace roofs reflects not a contradiction, but a flexible process of reinterpretation that highlights the figure’s variability. As a polyphonic narrative figure, the Monkey King could become almost anything—or nothing at all—and thus be re-signified within new ideological and material environments.

Lastly, Paola Zamperini, in The Habits of Monkeys. The sartorial journeys of apes in Chinese literature, follows the ways in which changes in attires, from furry “nakedness” to human and divine garb, track and complete the ontological metamorphoses of simian heroes in premodern Chinese literature, from the Tang chuanqi superhuman white ape to the gibbons in the 17^th century story collection, The Cup That Illuminates the World, and Sun Wukong in Journey to the West. We will explore the epistemologies of clothing and nakedness in these fictional narratives through the lens of the sartorial performances of their simian protagonists. Some of them ape humans by wearing their garments and as a result often lose their freedom and their lives, in some cases, becoming literally part of the very fabric of human clothing. In turn, humans wearing monkey fur and attire infused with simian blood are deployed to shed light on the complexities of becoming and remaining a human, a man, and, at times, a woman. Thinking with the clothes of monkeys will thus allow us to evaluate the literal and immaterial fashions through early and early modern Chinese authors’ constructed ideals and aberrations of humanity, especially in the homosocial world reflected in these narratives.

The panel participants bring together a vast range of professional identities, institutions, voices and positionalities in the US and beyond. Huang Dingru, the presider, is a rising star in non-human studies and zoopoetics in Chinese and Sinophone studies; Hedberg, one of the few Anglophone Sino-Japanologists, takes on the fraught South-Asian/East Asia comparative literary nexus in novel ways; Wall, one of Europe’s leading Koreanists, brings a much needed focus on material and vernacular cultures to the fore; lastly, Zamperini, a Southern European Sinologist active both in the US and Europe, works from within Gender and Sexuality Studies and Chinese and East Asian studies to showcase the importance of fashion studies for zoopoetics. Bringing these four scholars together is a rare chance for fostering meaningful, innovative exchanges for both panelists and their audience.