The trilogy scans the artist and his grandfather’s separate diasporic journeys towards a sensing of the bio-molecular and the cosmic. The methods involve transforming modalities of the human genetic code to audio-visuals; and mapping across civilisations’ myths and ancient scripts.
The series looks into the psycho-physical architectures of dwelling. Its primary gesture is in the act of building site-specific, sonic proto-structures with concrete membranes. Recurring materials in this series include salt-infused concrete to coax the phenomenon of salt bloom (efflorescence) over time, and sonic piece Datum, a series of pulses composed from inverse gamelan sounds.
From the standpoint of Southeast Asia emerging as new nations, the series looks at the popular imageries of national and cultural identities during the Cold War period. Having left his hometown at a young age, Boedi's view of his former country was mostly through images and the imagined.
A transliteration from Hokkien to Bahasa Indonesia, kang ouw means ‘rivers and lakes’ or jianghu (江湖) in Mandarin. The series inquires the imageries in wuxia films that Widjaja grew up watching in the 1980s through bootleg VHS tapes. They were officially banned in Indonesia during President Suharto’s New Order regime (1966 - 98), a period of systemic suppression of Chinese culture.
A body of works that explores a diasporic language—hovering between word and image, sound and meaning—informed by the intercultural liminality of the migrant experience.
The series speaks to migratory notions of belonging, physical movement and isolation. Its first 9 chapters fold Live Art strategies into wide-ranging artistic outcomes that include drawings, photographs, spatial installations, video and sound performances. Chapter 10 onwards engages with invisible material, including bio-molecular DNA code and cosmic ray muons.