This pilot issue of RUANG// Journal brings together writings on art and artists from Southeast Asia, focused on practices shaped by material research, environmental conditions, technological systems, and lived experience.

The issue features texts on Filippo Sciascia’s material research into light and learning; Indah Arsyad’s AMRTA, where river data, sound, and ritual intersect; and Sofya Skidan’s hybrid practice operating between digital systems and shamanic imaginaries. Other contributions consider the painted interiors of Judith Ansems, the slow, tactile surfaces of Ustina Yakovleva, and Nathaniel Amaris’s examinations of containment and vulnerability. Together, these texts follow how artistic knowledge takes form through sustained engagement with and careful translation of materials, technologies, and environments.

RUANG// Journal understands writing as a relational process. It speaks in English in order to facilitate exchange of thought across Southeast Asian countries and to reach beyond the region. While proposing a firm manifesto of RUANG// as a whole, its intention is not to set out a doctrine, but rather to establish a rhythm. One defined by the kinds of texts it brings together: intellectually rigorous yet accessible writing that connects ecology, technology, and indigenous modes of knowing, and treats art as a means of thinking through how we inhabit, process, and, eventually, can improve the world around us.