Art and its Ecopolitics in Southeast Asia – Guest-edited Special Issue
Please send all submissions for, and queries regarding, this issue to artecopol.seongmail.com.

Deadline for proposals and abstracts (in all formats):

Nov 1, 2025 (please submit an abstract of 400-500 words, and a brief biographical note).
Deadline for the submission of complete manuscripts for accepted proposals (in all formats):

Mar 1, 2026 (please see below for more details about the submission formats).
Guest Editors: Louis Ho, Michelle Lim, Sushma Griffin

In his seminal tome, Expanded Cinema (1970), Gene Youngblood describes the artist-ecologist as ‘one who deals with environmental relationships’, for whom the chief creative gesture is ‘the revelation of previously unrecognized relationships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical’ (Youngblood, 1970: 346). An ecology involves a gamut of systems and their actors, encompassing a web of vibrant, dynamic correlations between organisms and their surrounds, from animal agents – human and nonhuman – to botanical or mineral ones, from physical ecosystems to networked, socio-political environments. The role of the artist, then, as producer whose creative material draws upon the relations between these entwined entities and their ecologies, becomes ripe for thinking through ecological systems in expansive ways.

Instigated by Youngblood’s expansive characterization of the role of the artist-as-ecologist, we invite submissions on ecopolitical and socio-ecological systems that inform and respond to cultural production in late-modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art histories and visual culture. We are interested in essays or other textual formats that reflect on ecosystems underpinning relationships between agents, practices and networks, from state and institutional structures to grassroots, insurgent and non-conforming modes of art-making. Of note would be practices that may be understood to disrupt or destabilize dominant hegemonies, or what we might provisionally describe as an ‘ecopolitics of the peripheral and the disruptive’; we are attentive to artists who reflect critically on how power, justice, and governance manifest across diverse agents and their operations, from ecocriticism and its intersections with feminist and queer imperatives, to human-nonhuman interactions and socio-political ecologies, including the implications of geo-political dynamics on various art worlds.

We also encourage contributions that consider how curators, filmmakers and other creative producers employ intermedial and transmedial strategies to reconfigure prevalent understandings of the status quo, critically analyzing the disruption of binaries and margins as method or metaphor, that uncover neglected narratives or highlight experiences of the intersectional and disenfranchised. Subjects of inquiry need not be limited to the human; it may encompass complex human and multispecies interactions, particularly in relation to ethical cohabitation in the natural environment. Analyses that go beyond the anthropocentric, taking into account multispecies coexistence and entanglements, and the evolving ecologies of urban and natural environments, are especially relevant. Ethical cohabitation, climate justice, and eco-critical perspectives on the Southeast Asian region — both within and beyond the gallery space — are central to this issue’s concerns.

Potential topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Ecocritical methodologies in Southeast Asian art history and criticism
- Artistic responses to climate crisis, urbanisation, and environmental degradation
- Transmedial and intermedial artistic strategies
- Gendered, feminist, queer, and intersectional ecologies in art-making
- Creative practices addressing human-nonhuman relations and multispecies justice
- Indigenous epistemologies, land rights, and environmental activism in - artistic practices
- Disobedient or decolonial aesthetics
- Art and exhibition-making as forms of resistance or resilience

Key texts:
- Baravalle, Marco et al (eds). Art for Radical Ecologies. Bruno, 2024.
- Dennis, Megan. Queer Ecology: Exploring the Intersections of Nature, Identity and Activism. Exhuberant Publications, 2024.
- Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
- Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993.
- Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future. Orbit, 2020.
- Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson (eds.). Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Indiana University Press, 2010.
- Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt et al(eds.). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Submission formats:
Articles: 5,000-7,000 words (incl. footnotes)
Reviews (exhibitions, publications): 1,000-2,000 words
Special formats (e.g. interviews, archival texts, visual essays) by prior arrangement

Please send all submissions for, and queries regarding, this issue to artecopol.seongmail.com.