Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to explore how local communities served as a platform for community members' interaction and manifestation of their identities, both individual and communal, through artistic practices, in Northern Wei (CE 386-582) China.

Paper long abstract:

This paper attempts to explore how social interactions in local communities were manifested through artistic practices in Northern Wei (CE 386-582) China. During the medieval period, individuals in local communities were bonded to greater collectives by participating in the erection of stone stelae which served as religious centers of the communities. Not only religious activities were carried out around the stelae, many social activities, such as interaction among community members who belonged to different ethnic and social groups, also took place in the form of stele erection and practice. Furthermore, such an artistic monument, usually placed at the major crossroads of local communities, identified by the titles and duties of the patrons as community members, as well as by their ethnical and regional symbol. It is within this context this paper attempts to reveal how such an artistic practice of stele erection can help create the integrity of the community and allocate individuals to the broader societal collective. It will discuss how stelae served as territorial and identical indicators for the members of a community, which created a platform for social interaction. Furthermore, it will adopt a functional symbolic approach to explore the artistic representations on stelae, in order to show how these emblems inherited the conventional way of creating cultural and regional identities. Finally, built upon which it will discuss how these emblems influenced the artistic practices of projecting identities in local communities around the same region in modern time.