BOEDI WIDJAJA 黄晨晗

Joshua Comaroff, Skin Deep
Black—Hut, Singapore Biennale Affiliate project, exhibition catalogue essay

The installation is a quiet, dark eminence—a sort of ka’aba at the centre of what Widjaja calls his ‘internal architectures’.

Susie Wong, The black hut
D+A 2016

The coldness and starkness of the concrete laden built room reifies into a memory of dwelling, eclipsed as it were by geometry and material...An expression of home is perhaps the expression of homelands.

Bruce Quek, Boedi Widjaja: Black—Hut
Leap 2016

It’s as if the notional wireframe of the gallery walls was detached, rotated some number of degrees, and then rendered in steel.

Boedi Widjaja, Paths of memory, identity and belonging
Artist's essay on Path. series

...led me to think of home as a never-ending process of drawing closer, to a country, a society and its communities. Chuck Close’s words resonate once again: illumination comes only through making. As I make my home here, I would like to explore the brighter paths that I see ahead.

Dawn Fung, Artist interview

I am going to come clean. The more I interact with your work, the more painful it feels. It

doesn't seem like that in the beginning though, which is more interesting for me. Because your work

is presented abstractly, it is a good defensive layer for me as a viewer to comprehend it in my own

time.

Zarina Muhammad, The forking paths of memory
Path. 1, The white city curatorial essay

Through examining and questioning personal ideas of home and the seeming intangibility of memory, rootedness, foreignness, displacement and alienation, the work, as described by the artist, is essentially about the “artist drawing a map of the city as he moves through it”.

Boedi Widjaja, Beautiful/Banal
15 sheets of A4 paper with text, 2009

Demanding to be understood, desiring spectacle;
I want it beautiful, I need it banal.

Louis Ho, FutureGreats
ArtReviewAsia 2014

His approach is at once autobiographical and oblique: the effects of displacement—its trauma, anxieties and melancholy—are channelled through materially-oriented explorations of the immigrant's estrangement and experience, works that often feature an intensely corporeal, processual dimension as well.

Ling Tiong, Memories & landfills: the lode in my heart
Path. 3, The lode in my heart exhibition catalogue essay

In accessing our own memories, we sometimes experience them in the third person, as if looking in from the outside. This seems to suggest an interior or “inside” to memory that can be inhabited. Yet, no matter how clearly memory is perceived, it can never be entered; we are perpetual outsiders looking into a sealed room.

Louis Ho, Artist Interview
Curator's interview for group exhibition A drawing show

I don't think about drawing as a medium; I see it closer to an action, a method or in my case, a faculty. It is about sensing intuitively from my location, a point, and the act to reach it.