Re-contextualising Steles: Media, Memory, and Materiality

This session focuses on the stele—inscribed stone—as a transhistorical and transcultural medium, examining how it has been interpreted, mobilised, and embodied within diverse cultural and political contexts. We foreground its dual identity as both textual artefact and material object, attending to its mobility and recontextualisation in global circulation. Such as the relocation and replication of ecclesiastical stelae during colonial expansion; the circulation, re-inscription, and re-carving of stelae in East Asia; the epistemological and curatorial challenges posed by stelae displayed in contemporary museums as ‘objects’ rather than ‘texts’; and the diminished material resistance of digitalised rubbings, which become part of immaterial data flows; etc.

We invite contributions that explore the stele’s entanglement with political, religious, and technological practices, and interrogate how textual legibility interacts with material opacity. We are interested in how inscription enables the stele’s mobility, and how this mobility produces temporal and cultural disjunctions between the site of origin and the site of reception. How do different cultural regimes reshape and reimagine the stele?

We also welcome critical approaches that ask: what changes when we move from reading the stone to sensing it? What forms of agency, resistance, or refusal reside in its weight, texture, geological origin, or emplacement? Can posthumanist and new materialist frameworks allow us to rethink the stele not as a passive vessel of meaning, but as an active participant in human and more-than-human networks? We expect to provoke thinking about the material intelligence of stone.

Follow-up discussion

After the presentations, we will hold a 30-minute follow-up discussion on the materiality of stone and its relationship to human intervention. The conversation will reflect on how stone, as a medium, resists, registers, or responds to ecological, cultural, and technological forces. A guest scholar of ecological art history will join the discussion. Panellists are welcome, though not obliged, to contribute.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Jing Wang, University of Edinburgh, j.wang-172@sms.ed.ac.uk

Tianyu Shi, University of Hamburg, Tianyu.shi@uni-hamburg.de

Ziyi Li, , China Academy of Art, liziyi@zgmsxy.wecom.work