Center for the Art of East Asia

The Center for the Art of East Asia is pleased to award Zhongtian Li the 2025 Liu Cong Memorial Prize for the Best Essay on East Asian Art and Visual Culture for his work “Revisiting the Colossal Boulder at The Stone Buddha Temple: Mitigation of Unruly Water Through The Religious Shaping of A Geoaesthetic Matrix.”  

Zhongtian’s paper examines the Stone Buddha (Shifo) Temple in Chongqing through the lens of eco-art history, analyzing how natural functions as a geological medium through which humans transform natural space into efficacious religious spaces. Centering on a colossal sandstone boulder carved with Buddhist reliefs in the tenth century, this paper argues that its morphology and iconography reflect both the shared local memories of environmental trauma and the impulse to mediate natural forces through religious expression. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that the Stone Buddha Temple is a geoaesthetic matrix that articulates the dynamic interplay between human needs and the natural landscape, as well as the intimate connections between Buddhist visual culture and the geographical environment in late tenth-century China.

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The Liu Cong Memorial Prize recognizes excellent scholarship in East Asian art and visual culture by graduate students at the University of Chicago and encourages the developing of writing skills for publishable essays. The Center for the Art of East Asia established the prize in 2010-11 in memory of former graduate student and Ph.D. candidate in the Art History Department, Liu Cong (1979-2008), a promising young scholar much admired for her talent and vitality of mind and spirit who was struck down by brain cancer. 

More about the Liu Cong prize