Chinese Kinesthetic Forms is a collection of papers, originally presented at Harvard FAS CAMLab in Fall 2022, that chart the distinctive richness of movement in China across historical contexts and cultural forms—from medieval dance and music evoking visions of Buddhist paradises, to the literati brush arts of painting and calligraphy, to theater and martial arts, to the renditions of all of the above in poetry, cinema, and digital media. Contributions explore how movement, as both expression and object of perception, unfolds experiential dimensions beyond the corporeal, encompassing ritual and spirituality, cosmology, and social relations. Representing original work by both emerging and established scholars, the volume offers a dynamic intervention into ongoing conversations on dance, kinesthetics, and China’s long history of performance. It ultimately argues for an understanding of movement not as an abstract concept, but instead as a fundamental organizing principle of human experience and expression.

Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China’s literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another.

Thinking about writing as the material product of a culture shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator and ultimate arbiter of a text’s meaning to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers through whose hands a text is reshaped, disseminated, and given new meanings. By yoking writing and materiality, the contributors to this volume aim to bypass the tendency to oppose form and content, words and things, documents and artifacts, to rethink key issues in the interpretation of Chinese literary and visual culture.