Multimodal installation with three-channel video essay, synthetic DNA and mist. Premiered at ShanghART West Bund Central, Shanghai (2025), and presented at NTU Museum, Singapore (2026). Installation views: NTU Museum, Singapore, 2026, unless otherwise noted.
The body carries what institutions are unable or unwilling to preserve. Spoken stories, displaced languages and inherited gestures keep fragments of the past alive, sometimes opaque even to those who carry them.
Drawing on research into epigenetics, Boedi Widjaja enters a speculative dialogue with DX|XD, an imaginary living cell, asking what a body might carry beyond conscious memory. His family’s experience as Chinese Indonesians meets a writer’s stories kept alive in prison, and landscapes marked by Cold War politics.
In the video essay, family testimony is heard alongside a poem shaped by the artist’s cultural inheritances. Encoded into synthetic DNA and dispersed as mist, the poem gives this act of translation a material form. History passes through the body and returns to the world changed, sometimes beyond recognition.
—Boedi’s father
Boedi’s parents recall how restrictions on trade and pressure to choose a nationality shaped their families’ lives in Indonesia. Political belonging entered the household through the need to earn a living, remain in a place and secure a future for their children.
The Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer was held as a political prisoner on Buru Island. Denied the means to write, he told stories aloud to fellow prisoners, who listened and remembered. Boedi returns to this episode to ask how stories survive when their means of inscription are taken away.
Filmed around Nanyang Lake, Yunnan Garden and the Chinese Heritage Centre at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the work moves through the former grounds of Nanyang University, where Chinese diasporic aspirations met the pressures of Cold War politics and nation-building. Boedi crosses this landscape dispersing his DNA-encoded poem as mist. A personal inscription meets a place already shaped by migration, language and contested belonging, suggesting that bodies can also act on the histories held in a site.
The work braids testimony, gesture and poetry, and then hands the poem to the audience. Visitors are invited to “self-infect”, spraying themselves with synthetic DNA that encodes the poem, which blurs the line between biological and cultural inheritance. They can receive it or refuse it. How might we carry inherited histories without reproducing their violence, and let them change through our encounters with others?
