In February 2026, a global research consortium bringing together leading universities, medical research centres, and public health institutes across Europe, North America, and Asia launched a coordinated effort to map the cumulative environmental exposures shaping human life.
It is an extraordinary admission. The environment is not external to the body. It never was. But only now, after decades of acceleration frenzy, has this become a scientific priority.
Does this effort arrive a minute too late.
There is a difference between producing knowledge about a landscape and producing knowledge in relation to it. Across Southeast Asia, artists are working from within their environments — in relation to their histories, communities, ecologies, and inherited infrastructures.
These are knowledge projects. But also truth projects.This first major issue of RUANG// Journal grows out of that recognition.
ISSUE #1
Nature & Ecology
by Yu Ke Dong
Operational images beyond the city: surveillance, colonial legacies, and forest ecologies in Robert Zhao Renhui’s work.
ISSUE #1
Nature & Ecology
Queer ecologies in Southeast Asian art transform extractive histories into practices of kinship and care.
ISSUE #1
Urbanism
Reimagining Singapore’s infrastructure as socio-ecological systems for collective tropical futures.
ISSUE #1
Nature & Ecology
by Victoria Hertel and Isa Pengskul
Tracing a droplet’s journey through monsoon currents, Mekong migrations, dams, and subsea data centers: elemental storytelling on water, contamination, and technological entanglement in Southeast Asia.
ISSUE #1
Indigenous Discourse
by Wency Mendes
A framework for imagining ecological futures through Indigenous knowledge, collective practice, and lived relations with land and water.
ISSUE #1
Colonialism
Counter-archives and digital reimaginings of colonial Southeast Asia through the works of Yee I-Lann and Agan Harahap.
ISSUE #1
Nature & Ecology
Decolonising the built environment: ecological entanglements, extractive histories, and technological reimaginings in the practices of Bagus Pandega, Derek Tumala, and Priyageetha Dia.
ISSUE #1
Labor & Work
by Elena Wise
Marcos Kueh’s installation reflects on labour, industrial time, and the ecological residues of global production.
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RUANG// is a platform for curatorial research, critical connoisseurship, and context-rooted art production across Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
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