TEAM
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 Zhang Qiang 张强 (Sichuan Fine Arts Academy) |
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 Christoph Anderl 安東平 (Ghent University) |
 Laurent Van Cutsem 方洛杭 (Ghent University) |
 Michela Bussotti 米蓋拉 (EFEO/UMR CCJ) |
 Marie-Françoise Plissart (photographer and filmmaker) |
Zhang Rui 張蕊 (Inalco/IFRAE) |
Gao Chao 高超 (Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture) |
 Paula Suméra 蘇美若(Inalco) |
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 Kento Ashikari 芦刈健人 (Kyoto University) |
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Lia Wei 魏離雅 
Manuel Sassmann 王平國 
Killian Cahier 耿良 (Inalco)
Francesca Berdin 白鳳滎 (Inalco)
Anna Le Menach 林紫溪 (Inalco)
Tchou-Tchou Tophoven 饶楚楚 (Inalco)CONTRIBUTORS
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Yolaine Escande 幽蘭 (CNRS/CRAL) |
Xue Lei 薛磊 (Oregon State University) |
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Sakata Gensho 坂田玄翔 (Independent epigraphist) |
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Tao Jin 陶金 (Architectural Design and Research Institute of Tsinghua University)
TEAM
Lia Wei 魏離雅 (Inalco/IFRAE) — Principal investigator. Lia Wei is maître de conférences in Chinese art history at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales and researcher at the Institut français de recherche sur l’Asie de l’Est. She was trained in art history and archaeology at Université Libre de Bruxelles and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and taught at SOAS and at the archaeology department in Renmin University of China, Beijing. Her own practice of seal carving, landscape painting, calligraphy and rubbing techniques motivated her interest in epigraphy and funerary or religious art. She is particularly interested in the creative tension between brush and chisel, from medieval inscribed landscapes to the practice of inscribing objects in late imperial China.
Zhang Qiang 张强 (Sichuan Fine Arts Academy) — Art historian and avant-garde calligrapher Zhang Qiang contributes to the project the results of joint survey conducted with Lia Wei since 2009. Professor Zhang Qiang is known for his works on the history of Chinese painting and calligraphy. He played a seminal role in the theorization of modern and contemporary calligraphy since the 1990s. In parallel to his research and teaching, Zhang Qiang has created long-term projects in contemporary ink art combining performance art and installation.
Manuel Sassmann 王平國 (Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities) — Manuel Sassmann acts as a consultant for this project, drawing on his experience as a member of the Buddhist Stone Sutras in China project, to which he contributes at all levels (research, programming, fieldwork, photography and image editing). He is particularly interested in research history and the reception of medieval epigraphy, in particular emblematic sites such as the Sutra stone valley in Mount Tai. He advises us on adapting international standards of encoding the data produced in this project to facilitate its integrability with data produced by other projects. His current line of research is to investigate how conventional epigraphic research and a historical perspective (collectionism, authentication) can be facilitated by methods of the Digital Humanities (text markup, digital imaging techniques, GIS).
Christoph Anderl 安東平 (Ghent University) — Christoph Anderl’s main research interests include medieval Buddhist texts – in particular Chan Buddhism – , Dunhuang manuscript materials and Buddhist iconography. He currently focuses on the role of inscriptions in the creation of religious landscapes, as part of the broader FROGBEAR project, co-directed by Chen Jinhua (University of British Columbia) and Ann Heirman (Ghent University). As editor-in-chief of the Database of Medieval Chinese Texts, he contributes expertise and assistance in correlating the graphic variants present in our corpus to the DMCT.
Laurent Van Cutsem 方洛杭 (Ghent University) — Laurent Van Cutsem specializes in medieval Chan Buddhist literature, and has expertise in codicology of Dunhuang manuscripts and variant characters from the late Tang to the Song in both manuscripts and woodblock prints. Laurent assists us in selecting character forms that can be defined as graphic variants, and relate them to forms found in medieval manuscripts. Laurent will also participate in the production of TEI-based editions of epigraphic sources and explore how methods in Social Network Analysis and graph theory could be used in the context of graphic variation.
Michela Bussotti 米蓋拉 (EFEO/UMR CCJ) — Michela Bussotti, directrice d’études at the l’École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and researcher at the Chine, Corée, Japon (CCJ) research laboratory , participated since the late 1990s in a large collaborative project aiming at cataloging rubbings from European collections, directed by Jean-Pierre Drège. Her research interests include Chinese cultural history and and visual culture, editing and publishing in late imperial China. Michela Bussotti co-edits a volume with the PI gathering rubbings exhibited and researched since 2022, and contributions from the exhibition-cum-conference “Pratique de l’estampage en Chine: Matérialité, transmission, réception” in March 2023.
Marie-Françoise Plissart (photographer and filmmaker) – Marie-Françoise Plissart has followed her inclination for visual narratives since her very first roman photo (Droit de regards 1985), through her many collaborations with anthropologists and art historians around various themes with a peculiar sensibility for architecture and the environment – to cite only but a few: Michelangelo’s quarries, the renovation of Atomium, her collaboration with Sophie Bruneau about Cézanne and the Sainte-Victoire mountain, her seas and trees series, etc -. She has travelled to China extensively since the 1970s, with a special interest for writing and landscapes.
Sakata Gensho 坂田玄翔 (independent epigraphist) — Author of the first monograph documenting the four mountains inscribed by Zheng Daozhao, Sakata Gensho was also among the firsts to visit the sites in the early 1980s. Over the years, he has gathered a valuable corpus of contextual photographs, monitoring the sites’ change over time, with the addition of paths and pavilions and the occasional displacement or loss of an inscription. The Altergraphy corpus will host a selection of digitized images from his archive, which he generously shared with us.
Zhang Rui 張蕊 (Inalco/IFRAE) — Zhang Rui holds a PhD in medieval Chinese literature, with her research primarily focusing on classical poetry and the literati culture of the medieval period. She will soon lead a seminar on the poetry and poetics of landscape in ancient China. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Collège de France and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where she conducted research on the Curtis collections and refined her expertise in the visual arts of the late imperial period (Ming and Qing dynasties). In recent months, she has led the Altergraphy team in translating several inscriptions by Zheng Daozhao and his son, Zheng Shuzu. Her interests lie particularly in exploring how the literati crafted their identities through a range of practices—literary, artistic, philosophical, and behavioral—as well as their conception of identity within spatial contexts. in 2025-2026, Zhang Rui will translate the Altergraphy corpus inscriptions as research assistant at the project.
Tao Jin 陶金 (Architectural Design and Research Institute of Tsinghua University) — Tao Jin is an architect at the Cultural Heritage Conservation Centre of the Tsinghua Architectural Design and Research Institute. He graduated from the University of Nottingham (England) in 2007 with a BArch (Hon.) degree and from the University of Chicago in 2020 with an MA in Divinity. Since 2011, he has been dedicated to contemporary religious architecture design and provides consulting services for several Daoist temples, especially Daoist Monasteries at Mountain Mao and Shanghai City God Temple. Since 2009, he has been learning, and studying Daoist rituals in the Jiangnan region and led a digital preservation project of Daoist rituals in Shanghai (2011-2015). He has also started research on Grotto-Heavens and Blissful Lands as cultural landscape. His current research focuses on understanding the invisible (temporary) ritual spaces in traditional Chinese architecture and landscape sites (including gardens) through occasional ritual behavior, and the religious ideas behind them. His publications include the monograph in Chinese “Covenant: The Religious Ethos and Initiation Rituals of Daoist Registers” (《盟约：道教法箓的精神内涵与授度仪式》, four volumes, Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2023) and the Chinese translation of Rolf A. Stein’s Le monde en petit: Jardins en miniature et habitations dans la pensée religieuse d’Extrême-Orient (《壶中天地：远东宗教思想中的盆景与民居》, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2025). His architectural projects include Chongxi Wanshou Daoist Abbey of Mountain Mao, Sacred Altar of Maitreya at Mountain Xuedou, and Shanghai Daoist Academy.
Gao Chao 高超 (Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture 北京建筑大学) — PhD Candidate in Architecture, his thesis investigates the interplay between vernacular dwelling and regional architectural typologies with environmental conditions and modernity. Gao Chao has participated in our field survey in September 2024, where he produced drone views all four mountains inscribed by Zheng Daozhao in order to reconstruct four models of the mountains, as well as more refined models for specific inscribed landmarks.
Paula Suméra 蘇美若 (Inalco) — Paula Suméra holds a degree in geography and a master degree in history from EHESS, as well as a second master degree in Chinese studies at Inalco. Paula is a PhD candidate in Inalco and is also associated to l’Institut Français de Recherche sur l’Asie de l’Est (IFRAE). She specializes in the geographical history of native official systems in the Wuling mountains area (present day Hubei province) in Late Imperial China. At Altergraphy, Paula builds mental maps, designs relationships between different categories of data, and adds the data collected during survey – precise locations and reconstructions of the mountainscapes – into our GIS.
Francesca Berdin 白鳳滎 (Inalco) — Francesca Berdin holds a degree in Chinese Studies from INALCO, where she also completed a Master’s focused on Northern Dynasties epigraphy. She later pursued a second degree in Archaeology at Sorbonne University and is currently a PhD candidate at IFRAE (Institut Français de Recherche sur l’Asie de l’Est). Her research explores stone-working traditions in medieval and early modern Southwest China. She is also a research assistant at Altergraphy, where she works on calligraphic variation and stone carving techniques.
Anna Le Menach 林紫溪 (Inalco) — Anna Le Menach is engaged in a professional master level training at Inalco, aiming at becoming a restorer of works on xuan paper. This specialization is joined by her personal works on paper. While traveling from one internship to another (Centre Pompidou, Atelier Camille Schmitt, Fondation Baur and soon Nanjing University of the Arts), she was able to compare private and institutional ways of preserving East Asian works of art in European collections. At Altergraphy, she takes part among other tasks in thinking an ontology for cataloging and describing rubbings.
Tchou-Tchou Rao Tophoven 饶楚楚 (Inalco) — Tchou-Tchou Tophoven is pursuing her master degree at Inalco with a professional orientation in filmmaking. She has a special interest in talismanic writing, seal carving and the visual analysis of calligraphy. At Altergraphy, she is working on a film project with photographer and filmmaker Marie-Françoise Plissart, narrating and annotating inscribed landscapes.
Killian Cahier 耿良 (Inalco) — Killian Cahier holds a master degree from the School of Fine Arts in Bordeaux. He has completed a second master degree in Chinese studies at Inalco, with a thesis on calligraphy modernization in East Asia with a focus on “misunderstandings”. At Altergraphy, Killian has built our tables to structure and host data in, and he has taken part in photographing inscriptions and rubbings, also assuming editing tasks.
Kento Ashikari 芦刈健人 (Kyoto University) — Ashikari Kento is completing his master degree in history at the University of Kyoto, with a thesis on Tubo history. He has joined Altergraphy during his exchange year at Inalco, and has since been embarked in a series of interviews with Mr. Sakata and other Japanese epigraphists or calligraphers of that generation. He is also investigating the earlier stage of reception of Zheng Daozhao’s oeuvre in Japan starting with the diffusion and reproduction of rubbings, in terms of social networks and publications.
CONTRIBUTORS
Yolaine Escande 幽蘭 (CNRS/CRAL) — Yolaine Escande is directrice de recherches at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and researcher at the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL). She has translated major treatises on Chinese painting and calligraphy, and published extensively on Chinese art history, including on the culture of landscape or ‘mountains and water’. Beyond her interest in inscribed landscapes, she is our interlocutor for the analysis of discourses and terminology related to the reception of medieval epigraphy in theoretical treatises on calligraphy.
Shao-Lan Hertel 何小蘭 (Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne) — Shao-Lan Hertel is currently the Director of Museum for East Asian Art Cologne. She served as Postdoctoral Fellow at Tsinghua University Art Museum, where she curates a special exhibition on calligraphy works dating from the Ming to the contemporary era. Her research specialises in Chinese calligraphy and ink art, with a focus on the late imperial, modern and contemporary periods, as well as cross-cultural exchange.
Lyce Jankowski 何淑真 (Musée royal de Mariemont) — Numismatist and art historian Lyce Jankowski is curator of the non-European collections of the Musée royal de Mariemont (Belgium). She investigates intellectual networks in Early Modern China, and contributed to our study day “Pratique de l’estampage” in march 2023 on the analysis of rubbings provenance and on their diffusion among Chinese collectors in early modern China.
Olivier Venture 風儀誠 (EPHE) — Directeur d’études at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), Olivier Venture is a specialist of Chinese epigraphy and palaeography. He investigates the diverse uses of writing in ancient China, since the mid-13th century BC to the Han period (3rd century BC-3rd century CE), when the latter spread to all components of society. He puts peculiar stress on the materiality of writing, and encourages and archaeologically-oriented approach to written sources. Olivier Venture has launched a workshop on graphic variation in 2021, and contributes to the edited volume “Pratique de l’estampage” since march 2023.
Xue Lei 薛磊 (Oregon State University) — Specialist of pre-modern Chinese calligraphy and painting, Xue Lei authored a monograph on the Yihe ming 瘞鶴銘 (Eulogy for Burying a Crane), a southern inscribed landscape contemporaneous of the 6th century inscriptions investigated by Altergraphy. Xue Lei took part in our September 2024 survey and provided valuable advice and expertise in the understanding of the sites, the inscriptions and their context of production. Further relevant points of comparison with his corpus include the later reception and diffusion of the moya inscriptions through the re-inscription of the sites and the circulation of rubbings.