Professor Kim is a specialist in Chinese Buddhist art, but her broader interest in cross-cultural relationships between art and ritual also extends to Korean and Japanese materials. She is particularly interested in symbolic rituals, the interplay between visibility and invisibility in Buddhist art, and the sacred spaces and religious macrocosms created by religious architecture for imaginary pilgrimages. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Art, Space, and Ritual in Medieval Buddhism: From a Liao Pagoda to Heian Japanese Esoteric Ritual.

Mimi Yiengpruksawan received a Ph.D. in Japanese art studies from UCLA in 1988. In her research and writing Yiengpruksawan focuses on Buddhist art and iconography with emphasis on political and social perspectives in the analysis of devotional imagery and ritual. Her methodological approach has always been cross-regional and interdisciplinary in nature, with a strong interest in the impact of the nonlocal and the catastrophic (ecological, environmental) on cultural production.