2022. Solo presentation at Esplanade Tunnel, Singapore. Curated by Lynda Tay.
Set in a magical island, the climactic scene in the Chinese wuxia novel《侠客行》(Xia Ke Xing or Ode to Gallantry) by famed author Jin Yong, witnesses its main protagonist decoding the poems inscribed in a labyrinth of caves. Illiterate, he saw the writings as images, responded to their graphical form and inadvertently attained mastery in the ultimate martial arts technique that eluded his lettered counterparts and predecessors.
Intrigued and informed by the aforementioned episode, Boedi Widjaja’s Kang Ouw《侠客行》unfurls from a system of architectonic-numeral script devised by the artist. These graphical Chinese seal-type forms are presented as banners that line both ends of the Esplanade Tunnel and are shown together with a series of methodologically conceived videos, drawings and sound works that examine notions of space and place. Converging Widjaja's long-standing and personal interest in wuxia films—known as kang ouw amongst the Indonesian Chinese community—alongside text-as-image and codes-in-visuals, the works present layered mediations of various spheres of knowledge fuelled by the artist’s multicultural imagination and experiences.
PDF - Curatorial text and artist’s interview published by the Esplanade
2021-22. Future Ages Will Wonder curated by Annie Jael Kwan, FACT Liverpool. Widjaja’s participation is supported by the National Arts Council (Singapore).
For his multisite trilogy of artworks, Boedi Widjaja encodes his synthetic and hybridised DNA as a linguistic source, along with ancient and original texts and cultural almanacs to create visual poetry and placemarkers that consider the impossibilities of language after the ruptures of personal histories, as experienced by the artist’s migrations from China to Indonesia and Singapore. Widjaja uses science and technology to extract and embed his DNA into the physical artworks, reclaiming space and land for his voice, work and identity to exist.
Listen to Podcast: Gaining Ground with Yarli Allison & Boedi Widjaja facilitated by Annie J. Kwan
Read pocast transcript
Solo exhibition at Helwaser Gallery, NYC, 11 Sep - 7 Nov 2019. Supported by the National Arts Council
Read exhibition catalogue
Read transcript of artist’s conversation with Boon Hui Tan, Director, Asia Society Museum on Sep 14, 2019.
Solo exhibition at ShanghART Singapore, 8 Dec 2018 - 12 Feb 2019, Singapore Art Week. Supported by the National Arts Council
Boedi Widjaja: Rivers and Lakes Tanah dan Air 江湖水土
ShanghART Singapore, 8 Dec 2018 - 12 Feb 2019
“Tracing an image by hand inevitably loses information of its reference but it also produces new modalities. The method suggests drawing a line across time.” - Boedi Widjaja
The exhibition spotlighted the artist’s practice of tracing, drawing and writing as interlaced, conceptual processes; as well as his extended research in the image negative through stone prints and the imageries of kang ouw (also known as wuxia) films, entertainment for the Chinese diasporic communities since the 1960s that have recently gained cross-cultural mass appeal.
The artist performed at the gallery during the exhibition. Across 8 days, he traced his father’s handwriting to cover a 10m wall. Widjaja had written a bilingual poem of four lines, “Rivers and lakes / Tanah dan air / Land and water / Sungai sejarah,” which were re-ordered in 24 permutations. Each line references geographical features, and holds multiple cultural associations. For instance “Rivers and lakes” is a literal translation of kang ouw, a psychogeographical realm of swordsmen and outlaws for the Chinese. And while “tanah dan air” means “land and water” in Bahasa Indonesia, the composite “tanah air” becomes “homeland”.
The artist’s father read aloud and penned down the 24 permutations. His voice recordings were broadcast in random order at the gallery, whereupon Widjaja traced his father’s handwriting, eventually covering the wall with this repeated text-as-image.
Live art. Performed at ShanghART Singapore, 8 Dec 2018 - 24 Jan 2019
Live art and textual work Rivers and lakes Tanah dan air progressively materialised in the gallery. The artist's bilingual poem of four lines, "Rivers and lakes / Tanah dan air / Land and water / Sungai sejarah" were re-ordered in 24 permutations, creating 24 poems. Each line, consisting of geographical features and elements, contains multiple cultural associations. Across 8 days during the exhibition, the artist listened to and traced his father's reading and writing of the poem in its 24 permutations; eventually he covered the blank 9m wall with this repeated text-as-image.
Images courtesy of ShanghART Singapore.
2021. Group exhibition at JWD Art Space, Bangkok. Curated by Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani.
The flag installation considers the contemporary legacy of the 1955 Bandung Conference, at a time of bi-polar geopolitical tension and global pandemic, the latter raising urgent questions for the value of synchronised, global cooperation. The Conference’s final communique culminated in a ten-point “Declaration on promotion of world peace and cooperation”. Unanimously adopted by the 29 delegates— majority newly-formed nations in Asia and Africa—the ten principles were hopeful assertions for a world in crisis during the Cold War.
The title of the work is drawn from Indonesian President Sukarno’s opening address at the Bandung Conference, where he quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic ode to a patriot who tipped the victory in the American Independence War through his midnight ride to warn of approaching enemy troops (A cry of defiance and not of fear / A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door / And a word that shall echo forevermore). Working with the notion of flags as coded dreams and declarations, Widjaja encoded the artwork title, and the Bandung Conference’s ten principles, into the flag graphics by transposing the Morse Code sounds to colours of differing wavelengths that were sampled from the 120 national flags of the Non-Aligned Movement; formulating an encoding system and a visual language that recurs in his practice.
Singapore Biennale 2019: Every step in the right direction. Artistic Director: Patrick Flores. Co-commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum and QAGOMA for Asia Pacific Triennial 9 and Singapore Biennale 2019. 22 Nov 2019 - 22 Mar 2020, National Gallery Singapore. Supported by LWC Alliance.
Installation: steel, wood, calcium silicate panels, pigment, concrete, mica, salt, petrified wood; sound (4:18 seconds).
“For his work in the Biennale, the artist installs a site-specific proto-structure that serves as a diptych to another work set up at the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2018. At SB2019, Black—Hut, Black—Hut is an architectural installation at the National Gallery Singapore’s courtyard, at the Coleman entrance. Descending the main staircase that leads to the basement, the work addresses the spatial and historical context of its site. The structure also references the gap between ground and land in tropical/subtropical vernacular houses that are built on raised floors, such as the Javanese joglo, the Queenlander house and the Malay house, as well as the HDB void deck. This becomes a productive entry point for Boedi’s interrogation of the interstices of Singapore’s modernity shaped by the tropical ver-nacular, and in his consideration of his own experience of migrating to the city-state, seeking ‘connections between public history and his private memories of house, home and homeland.’” — Artistic Director Patrick Flores
The form of the proto-structure is generated from the site’s ground plane and the height difference when measured against the former as one descends each step; resulting in the bird’s eye view profile of the structure corresponding with its cross-section. On the planar surface is an epidermal application of concrete infused with salt; marking the work with ‘salt bloom’, or efflorescence, over time. Four cubes of fossilised wood sit on the lower part of the stairway, aligned to the N-S axis. Marking the imagined centre of the site is Datum - a sonic composition that’s made up of a sequence of inverted gamelan sounds. Visitors enter into the nexus to experience the sound and space.
Documentation video by Harry Chew. Images by Cher Him. Diagrams by the artist.
The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial Of Contemporary Art. Curatorial manager: Zara Stanhope. Co-commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum and QAGOMA for Asia Pacific Triennial 9 and Singapore Biennale 2019. 24 Nov 2018 - 28 Apr 2019, Queensland Art Gallery.
Installation: steel, wood, calcium silicate panels, pigment, concrete, mica, salt, petrified wood; sound (4:18 seconds).
Extending his research in site-specific proto-structures, Black—Hut, Black—Hut is a diptych separated by space and time. The first of the diptych was constructed at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2018, and the second, the National Gallery Singapore in 2019. The work is an architectural correspondence between the Malay house, the Queenslander, the void deck of Singapore’s social housing flats, and the Javanese joglo as Widjaja was drawn to the overlaps between the vernacular air-houses and urban dwelling.
Black—Hut, Black—Hut was built in QAG Gallery 5, extending the overhang of Gallery 2. “I was first drawn to... what I perceived to be a kind of spatial rupture - the ‘space underneath’ splits open two grounds - land and floor - and holds them apart so to speak...the ‘space underneath’ in Black—Hut, Black—Hut wasn’t conceived as empty but rather, it was imagined as a productive space that could potentially be filled with movements, emotions and memories,” Widjaja explained.
QAGOMA’s curator Reuben Keehan observed that the elements in the underside of the work that recall Widjaja’s lived experience, “The work’s supporting poles are painted in the same turquoise that features prominently in the architecture of Solo City, including the iconic Surakarta Palace and the fixtures of Widjaja’s childhood house. The four central pillars hover above four blocks of Indonesian petrified wood, paying homage to the way that the structure supports the ceiling of the joglo house. At the centre point of the installation, which Widjaja has carefully aligned with the centre of the room, a column of sound descends from a directional speaker, a digitally treated recording of a Javese gamelan that can only be heard when the viewer moves into its path. On the upper side of the work, a number of intersection diagonal lines drawn between the corners of the gallery space overlay the cardinal points of the compass.”
Read essay by QAGOMA curator of Contemporary Asian Art Reuben Keehan for Artlines no. 4, 2018
Images 1-3 from the top by Natasha Harth, courtesy of QAGOMA, 4-6 by Audrey Koh. Architectural diagram above by the artist.
2016-2017. Solo exhibition. Singapore Biennale Affiliate Project. Commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Curated by Melanie Pocock and Bala Starr. Supported by LWC Alliance. 28 Oct 2016 - 1 Feb 2017, Earl Lu Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore.
Installation: steel, wood, calcium silicate panels, pigment, concrete, mica, salt; sound (4:18 seconds)
"The installation is most simply described as one space superimposed upon another. The artist introduces four new walls that intersect the Earl Lu Gallery, appearing to slip in and out of its existing perimeter. This new rectangle is not uniform along its length. As a spatial enclosure, it varies from skeletal metal framing to a solid surface coated in dark concrete render. Widjaja’s four walls counter the free-form geometry of the existing gallery plan—which he finds ‘disorienting’ and ‘insubstantial’—with a sober, rectilinear form. The position of the hut is carefully rationalized, distributed around a notional centre point that is equidistant from three existing columns. At this centre point is a parabolic speaker, which plays a sound piece created for the work.
The installation is a quiet, dark eminence—a sort of ka’aba at the centre of what Widjaja calls his ‘internal architectures’. It is an object around which a series of biographical–experiential structures are related, where buildings and selves stand in a process of co-creation. Widjaja believes that these structures can be ‘unpacked’, can be ‘mapped’. Black—Hut, then, stands as an analogue to the famous hut on the frontispiece of the abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture (1753): an explorative outpost, the first shelter in an expansive psychic wilderness." - Excerpt from exhibition catalogue essay 'Skin Deep' by Joshua Comaroff.
Read catalogue.
Selected media
Priyanka Ghosh. A Guide to Singapore Art Week. Culturetrip, 23 Jan 2017. Web. Helmi Yusof. Scene still sizzles after art stage. The Business Times, 20 Jan 2017: 24. Print.Bruce Quek. Boedi Widjaja: Black Hut. LEAP, Issue 42, 10 Jan 2017. Web. Susie Wong. The Black Hut. d+a, Issue 95 2016/2017: 116-119. Print.
2018. Live art. Commissioned by the Asian Film Archive, State of Motion: Sejarah-ku, curated by Kamiliah Bahdar.
Installation: white stones, 3m x 2m x 5cm; ink and graphite on paper, 29.7 x 21cm. Sound collaborator: Tong Wei Jie. Performers: Wei Xuan and Jeremy Sim.
State of Motion 2018: Sejarah-ku explores film as a site of cultural and ideological production in the last decade of pre-independence Singapore. Reactivating snippets of Singapore’s national past, Sejarah-ku (Malay for 'my history') comprises seminal Malay-language films, and artworks made in response to them. Path. 9, ))) ) ) )) was Widjaja's response to intercultural romance Sri Menanti (1958), a site-specific spatial installation and live art at the latter's key filming location - mangrove river Sungei Serangoon.
The work used the underside of a flyover as an improvised concrete theatre; and the audience experienced the sounds of a flautist performing from the opposite bank. The flyover became an acoustic environment/device, the performance took place without any other amplification. The composition used five flute tones and was based on a graphical score—a matrix of stone prints made using five stones. The graphical score is inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s ideas on music serialism and the five tones, the pentatonic scale found in traditional Chinese, Javanese and Indian music.
Video by Harry Chew. Photographs by Audrey Koh.
2012-15. Public art, Beauty World MRT Station, Singapore. Commissioned by Land Transport Authority, curated by June Yap.
Installation: sandblast and paint on granite tiles. 1.6 x 91m.
The public art explores in visual form the intersection of written languages from the region, in a reflection upon the cultures that make up Singapore. Referencing the earliest forms of writing, within the 91m long artwork are ‘words’ that may not be read in the conventional sense, but that are suggestive of language and its interwoven nature. Letterforms in Chinese, Jawi, Tamil and Latin are layered one upon another and where they intersect, are rhythmically composed.
The artwork presents the multi-cultural mix of language as the effect of multi-culturalism, and invites the viewer to ‘hover’ between reading and looking, in an understanding that occurs through an aesthetic intuition.
Imaginarium: Into the space of time, 6 May - 26 Aug 2018. Commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum.
Installation: 14 mutoscopes, 3 LED displays and TV monitors.
Through mechanical and algorithmic animation devices, and images drawn from time-travel films and NASA documentary video footages, the installation looks into time as a space for memory and illusion.
Persistence of vision is a theory for the human perception of moving images. It suggests a juncture of past and future in the present—the mind seeing an image that is a split second slower than what the eyes see on screen, one blends multiple discrete images and perceives an animation. In 2012, I went to the prehistoric caves in Lascaux and saw parietal art of animals, some with body parts repeatedly painted, akin to Italian Futurist aesthetics. I read later that what I had seen, together with the strobing effect of a flickering torch, could have been the earliest animation work ever produced in human history.
In 1971, the future was imminent as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first lunar landing aboard the Apollo 11 spaceflight. The historic moment was captured on celluloid using on-board camera of the lunar module. It was the greatest space film ever made, a picture of fact following fiction, produced three years after Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969). In 1972, the visual and sounds of David Bowie’s Space Oddity were launched. In the same year, Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky released acclaimed sci-fi film Solaris, which included a 5-minute plus long take of a drive through the highways of Tokyo. The sequence shifting back and forth between color and black and white; and the film asked existential questions: What if? If only? In 2018, Starman was in space—a dummy in a spacesuit in a red Tesla Roadster mounted with 3 cameras and playing the tune of Space Oddity—as he attempted to enter into Mars orbit.
Images courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.
27 Sep - 11 Oct 2019, 28 Temenggong Road, Singapore. Commissioned by the Temenggong Artists-in-Residence, Singapore; and exhibited in Longings, 寄望, jiwa, curated by Yueh-Siang Chang. The two-person exhibition was held on the occasion of the National Museum of Singapore’s receiving of the gift of Tang Holdings’ Collection of Raffles memorabilia.
Work in Path. 10 includes live art; outdoor installation comprising flags, soil, synthetic DNA; archival prints; installation comprising microscope, microdots and synthetic DNA. In consultation with geneticist Assoc. Prof Dr. Eric Yap, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine.
Yinchuan Biennale. Curated by Bose Krishnamachari. 9 Sep - 18 Dec 2016, Yinchuan Art Museum. Commissioned by Yinchuan Biennale. Supported by the National Arts Council.
Installation: UV inkjet vinyl print on steel panels. 0.8m x 39m x 5cm.
The outdoor installation is a couplet, comprising of two lines: “Art is only a continuation of war by other means” and ‘War is only a continuation of politics by other means”. The latter is a quote from On War, a book by military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz and the former, by the artist. Both texts reference an unverified quote by China’s first Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai: “Diplomacy is only a continuation of war by other means” as reported by American journalist Edgar Snow.
Hovering between being read and seen, the work contemplates the entwinement of global art, mass media, war and politics; a specific moment where geopolitical tensions are simultaneously negotiated through cultural economic policies and military power.
Selected media
Anjuly Mathai. State of the art. The Week. 9 Oct 2016. Web.
China-Yinchuan/Art Biennale. China Central Television CCTV+ News Content. 10 Sep 2016. Web.
Chen Yaojie. Opening of the inaugural Yinchuan Biennale: For an image, faster than light. Artron. 9 Sep 2016. Web.
2014. Solo exhibition. Commissioned by the Esplanade, Singapore. Supported by Canon
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books! - Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library
The first part of the exhibition title is drawn from Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same name. Benjamin wrote in praise of collectors’ adoration of books. Bookending the title is 书城, Chinese for “City of Books”, and also the nickname of Bras Basah Complex in Singapore.
The exhibition is a result of Widjaja’s reconsideration of his personal library through the gaze of Benjamin’s “collector”. Every book contains more than one story – that of the authored text written on its pages, and those embedded within the personal memories triggered by the book… memories of the whiff of freshly-printed books, the familiar grounds of a beloved bookstore, or, for the artist, the memory of childhood visits to the “City of Books” with his father.
From the age of nine, the artist lived apart from his parents, sent to another country to escape ethnic tensions in his hometown. Air travel was very expensive then, and the artist’s father visited his children in Singapore once or twice a year, staying for a week each time. As the artist’s father loved books, the family would spend their time together in bookstores.
The physical separation between child and father was bridged in the City of Books. Yet, towards the end of the week, the same place also became the family’s parting grounds. Thus, Widjaja’s memory of the City of Books is complicated and emotional. Like airports, the City of Books contains both reunions and separations. The place signals ARR/DEP. In reconsidering his personal library, the artist has realised that embedded in his books, regardless of genre and content, is this latent memory of the problematic City of Books.
In Path., Widjaja seeks to build a (hopeful) future through the recasting of the past. The exhibition starts with three books taken from libraries across three generations - the artist’s, his father’s and his daughter’s. The books, randomly selected, are studied. Comparing them, we see similar motifs and themes, such as steel, displacement, acceptance in a new place, emerge. Drawing out these connections is a way for Widjaja to transform these formerly isolated, personal libraries into shared ones, before bringing them into the community.
The exhibition presents the outcome of Widjaja’s investigation into his library in its material, aural, spatial and temporal dimensions. Through the process of making the works, and the “liveness” of the public events, the artist dismantles and reconstructs his memory of the City of Books, a memory deeply lodged in his library. The artist looks to a rebuilt library, containing books with the promise of new stories.
Read artist’s journal.
Selected media
Boedi Widjaja. "Paths of Memory, Identity, and Belonging" Singapore Insights from the Inside Vol II Ed. Richard Hartung. Singapore International Foundation, 2015. 116-119. Print.
Trent Davis. Chat: Boedi Widjaja. juice magazine. 28 Nov 2014. Web.
Mark Leong. Retracing Paths. catalog magazine. 26 Nov 2014. Web.
Think Big Case Study - Bridging Distance Bridging Generations. Canon. 24 Nov 2014. Web.
Pooja Makhijani. Path. 6, Unpacking my Library . 书城 by Boedi Widjaja. notabilia. 7 Nov 2014. Web.