The International Symposium on Image Portrayal was held at the IEAS from 8 to 10 December 2016. More than twenty scholars from Japan, Korea and China attended this transregional symposium and presented their research findings. The theme of this symposium concerns with subject matter of the works of art, as opposed to their forms. The co-organizers and invited keynote speakers included Professor YOSHIHARA Hiroto of Waseda University, Professor NO Sung Hwan of University of Ulsan and Dean WANG Yong of IEAS of Zhejiang Gongshang University.

 The characteristic of this transregional symposium is that the speakers presented new academic idea which transgresses the borders of traditional academic disciplines such as literature but devours whole cultural implications of images in the perspective of brand new East Asian iconology, which is supposed to analyze the hidden meanings produced by images inside instead of limiting itself to the realm of art. And in order to achieve this objective of tracing the hidden meanings, most speakers in this symposium also discussed histories of visual studies and transformation of image portrayal in East Asian nations. The symposium was in essence very interdisciplinary and opened the realm of images to literary interpretations. Facing the possibility of developing a new visual literacy by images in East Asia, research methods to study images are also developed outside traditional academia. The discussion on the application of ultra-violet light for image analysis in this symposium is an example. Most speakers in this symposium had a common punchline that they regarded the tracing of pictorial meanings through time and dimension in East Asia an essential core of unique East Asian iconology. In 2017, University of Ulsan in Korea will host this symposium.