Call for Papers (unthemed and on a rolling basis)

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia welcomes the submission of original, unpublished scholarship for its issues published every March and October. We are open to articles and other contributions related to the contemporary and modern art of Southeast Asia, as well as the region’s visual cultures and material cultures, and related areas of inquiry. We invite contributions from scholars working in and between all disciplines and fields of inquiry, as well as from artists, curators, and others. Please do also look out for our calls for papers for thematic special issues.

Full manuscripts should be submitted to southeastofnow@gmail.com, and can be submitted at any time. If accepted by the editorial collective, manuscripts for articles will undergo a double-blind peer review process.

As of November 2025, we are only reviewing full manuscripts as submissions for articles, and will not be accepting abstracts as proposals.

We accept:

  • SHORT RESPONSES (1,200 – 2,000 words) including artists’ pages
  • ARTICLES (4,000 – 7,000 words, including footnotes)
  • REVIEWS (1,000 – 3,000 words) of publications, exhibitions, conferences and other projects
  • TRANSLATIONS of archival documents and other texts, from any relevant language.
  • Other formats or lengths upon discussion with the editorial collective.

Before submitting your original, unpublished work that falls within the journal’s scope of Southeast Asian art and visual culture, please review the documents needed for an article submission.

An article submission should include the following 3 items as separate Microsoft Word documents (.docx): 

  • Title page with biographical statement(s) of maximum 100 words each
  • Full manuscript that consists of an abstract of maximum 200 words, followed by the main text of 4,000 to 7,000 words (inclusive of footnotes). The main text should contain all illustrations with captions, with reference list included on a new page after the main text. Please refer to the journal’s style sheet for details on formatting. This document must be anonymized, with the author’s name removed from the file name, main text, notes, and illustrations. This ensures anonymity for the double-blind review process.
  • All images and captions compiled in a Microsoft Word document, maximum 10 MB in file size. If the manuscript is accepted, the author will need to submit high quality images for publishing. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain permissions for images owned by third parties, and to hold on to documents demonstrating proof of permission. These documents should be supplied during the final submission for publication.

All submissions will be assessed by the editorial collective, with guidance from the advisory board as necessary. Accepted proposals for articles will be sent for double blind peer review by two external experts appointed by the editorial collective. Other materials will be assessed by the editorial collective, but can also be sent for external peer review if requested by the author and agreed by the editorial collective.

 

Call for Papers: “Art and its Ecopolitics in Southeast Asia” – Guest-edited Special Issue

Please send all submissions for, and queries regarding, this issue to artecopol.seon@gmail.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: 4,000-7,000 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.seon@gmail.com.