Special Issue Call for Papers | Journal of Art Studies, Issue 40

Special Issue: Modularity, Recomposition, and Mobility of Visual Forms in East Asia

Submission Guidelines

Guest Editor: Professor Hui-wen Lu

Deadline: January 15, 2027

Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Background

In East Asian artistic and cultural traditions, many works emerged not through entirely novel creation, but through the selection, combination, adaptation, and recomposition of existing elements. Written characters, images, decorative motifs, architectural components, and even pre-existing texts could be detached from their original contexts and transformed into reusable units, generating new meanings through new combinations. Such practices have appeared across media and historical periods and have been examined in fields including the histories of calligraphy, painting, literature, and the book, as well as material culture studies. Yet scholars have rarely considered them together within a broader framework that cuts across media and regions.

Lothar Ledderose’s Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (2001) profoundly shaped scholarly understandings of modularity in Chinese art. Ledderose showed how artistic forms ranging from Chinese characters and the terracotta army to export porcelain and architecture could generate vast, complex systems by combining a finite repertoire of modules. Yet modularity's significance extends beyond standardization and mass production. Throughout East Asian visual culture, established models were often broken down into mobile, recombinable units that moved across time, space, and media. Through repeated acts of recomposition, these units generated new cultural meanings and contributed to the formation and transformation of artistic traditions.

This special issue approaches the mobility of East Asian visual forms and the mechanisms through which models and canons are constructed from the perspectives of modularity, recomposition, and mobility. Such processes can be observed across a wide range of practices. In calligraphy, the practice of assembling characters (jizi, 集字) extracts individual characters from the works of celebrated calligraphers and recombines them to produce new inscriptions, couplets, texts, and works of calligraphy. Painting manuals break down visual motifs—such as rocks, trees, and figures—into pictorial units that can be studied, replicated, and recomposed. Encyclopedic compilations (leishu, 類書), anthologies, and other literary collections rearrange existing texts to construct new structures of knowledge and literary canons. Architecture, craft, and decorative systems likewise sustain and disseminate forms through the repetition, variation, and recombination of established components and patterns. In these cases, modules function not only as technical units of construction but also as vehicles for aesthetic values and cultural authority.

This special issue is particularly interested in the historical lives of modules. Rather than treating modules as fixed and immutable components, we ask how they are appropriated, transformed, and reinterpreted across different historical and spatial contexts. As forms are recomposed, tradition is continually reproduced through selection, recombination, and reinvention.

We invite contributions from scholars working in art history, book history, epigraphy, archaeology, material culture studies, and related fields to explore how modularity and recomposition have operated as important mechanisms of cultural transmission and innovation. We particularly encourage cross-regional, cross-media, interdisciplinary, and theoretically engaged approaches.

Topics of Interest

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Modular production and the construction of form in East Asian visual culture

• Recomposition, adaptation, and reinvention of visual forms

• The historical development of assembled-character calligraphy (jizi, 集字)

• The circulation and use of painting manuals, preparatory designs (fenben, 粉本), design models, and decorative patterns

• Encyclopedic compilations (leishu, 類書), anthologies, illustrated and textual compilations, and the reorganization of knowledge

• The transmission of architectural components and forms

• The recombination, hybridization, and transmission of motifs, techniques, styles, and compositions in painting

• Formal exchange and cross-regional mobility within East Asia

• The material conditions, technological foundations, and social contexts of modular practices

• Theoretical approaches to modularity, assemblage, recomposition, mobility, and related concepts

• The transmission, translation, and recontextualization of visual forms

  
  

Submission Guidelines

Submissions in both Chinese and English are welcome. Manuscript length, formatting, and other requirements should follow the journal’s general submission guidelines.

Please send manuscripts to the Journal of Art Studies at journalofartstudies@gmail.com and indicate that the submission is intended for the special issue.

The journal will continue to accept general submissions during the call for papers for this special issue.

The special issue is scheduled for publication as Issue 40 (June 2027).

For detailed submission guidelines, please consult the Journal of Art Studies website: https://lit.ncu.edu.tw/art/submission.asp