What does it mean to live when time seems to fold back on itself – when images, myths, and memories return like refrains, never quite the same, never entirely gone? These repetitions can feel weary, but they can also offer openings: within the noise of the everyday, we glimpse how places, technologies, and rituals quietly make and remake the way we live, work, and dream.
Across the pages of CONG 002, writers and artists trace these structures of the present. Moving from Shanghai’s clubs to a Hong Kong department store, from fashion in Tokyo to healing rituals and wellness spas in Thailand, they map Asia as a tangle of material and immaterial cultures, suspended between exhaustion and renewal. Our sense of the real is also stretched by designers reimagining how buildings feel and function, artists cultivating and calibrating the atmospheric, and technologists rethinking intelligence itself.
Moving between these registers, CONG 002 continues its experiment in crossing disciplines – in circling the square, so to speak. Architecture and acts of place-making also become ways of sensing inner life; myth, a means of grasping what remains hidden and yet endures. The journal moves along this threshold – between the material and the symbolic, where meanings are felt and remade, sometimes becoming an architecture of its own.
Daniel Szehin Ho
Executive Editor