Boedi Widjaja

Lives and works in Singapore

Artist statement

My practice began with migration as a condition. I was born in Solo, Indonesia, and moved to Singapore at nine, without my parents. Across three countries and almost twenty moves, home became something I encountered through photographs and stories. I did not simply grow up with an image of home; I grew up inside one. I frame my work through house, home and homeland. House is the structure that contains us, whether biological, architectural or technological. Home is memory, attachment and belonging. Homeland is history, language and politics. Moving between them lets me bring biological, cosmic, architectural and symbolic forms into relation, across scales that would otherwise stay apart. Trained in architecture and design, I think of images as spatial and material. An image is not a representation but something that happens between a thing and what it encounters: salt crystals growing on concrete, a poem encoded in DNA and dispersed as mist, a cosmic-ray muon leaving its track on a blinded camera sensor. Each is a trace, carrying the translations that made it. Migration turned home into an image. Over time, that image has grown dimensions of its own.

Artwork