The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

177 ARTISTS Top: Diagram for Black—Hut, Black—Hut 2018–19 / Courtesy: The artist Below: Boedi Widjaja at his childhood home in Solo, Indonesia, 2012 / Photograph: Audrey Koh / Image courtesy: The artist BOEDI WIDJAJA Born 1975, Solo, Indonesia Lives and works in Singapore As a child, Indonesian-born artist Boedi Widjaja faced a series of upheavals. At the age of nine, he and his sister were placed in a number of guardianship housing arrangements in Singapore by their Chinese–Indonesian parents, who were fearful for their children’s safety amid heightened ethnic tensions at home. The artist cites the challenges of being separated from his parents, learning new languages, and adapting to new cultures as experiences that inform his practice, in particular, his ongoing interrogations of house, home and homeland in Black—Hut, Black—Hut 2018–19, a co-commission with Singapore Art Museum. 1 One of the differences Widjaja noticed between his home in Solo, Java, and his adopted city was Singapore’s abundance of boxy, concrete, residential high-rises, known as HDB blocks. 2 Subsequently, the 'Black—Hut' series, started in Singapore in 2016, uses concrete as part of its framework, the normally solid construction material exploited for its fluidity and texture. The previous incarnation of Black—Hut comprised concrete walls, with black pigment, mica and salt added, which prompted changes to the surface. Concrete is employed by Widjaja as a ‘changing, breathing, organic’ substance, reflecting the artist's emotional associations with concrete housing — and more broadly the concept of home. 3 HDB housing blocks typically have a community space on the ground level, known as a ‘void deck’. These open spaces have ceilings held up by tall concrete columns. The 2016 iteration of Black—Hut , while resembling a void deck, was a room within a room that consciously incorporated the building's four supporting columns for their likeness to the important Javanese architectural feature known as the sakaguru , which supports the entire roof of a traditional joglo house. Widjaja’s APT9 installation also takes inspiration from his architecture studies in Sydney. It was in Sydney that Widjaja learnt about Australian housing design and Glenn Murcutt’s mandate that dwellings should ‘touch the earth lightly’, as seen in an iconic regional style — the tin and timber Queenslander. This vernacular housing seen throughout the state of Queensland is characterised by its raised flooring, mounted on tall stumps. These elements, however, are hardly exclusive to this part of the world. As Widjaja asserts, Queenslanders share conscious or unconscious resonances with designs seen in South-East Asia, including Malay attap , the aforementioned void decks of Singaporean HDB residences, and the sakaguru columns of the joglo . 4 A site-specific, architectural proto-structure, Black—Hut, Black—Hut is installed in the Queensland Art Gallery’s lower level. It visually extends the overhang of the upper level of the Gallery with a black concrete platform. It also formally resembles raised flooring in structures like the Queenslander. The work is painted turquoise to match the majestic Surakarta Palace in the artist’s childhood home in Solo, and its main pillars — its sakaguru — stop just shy of the footings, precariously removing any sense of architectural support and emphasising the creation’s conceptual underpinnings. The base footings are made of mineralised, petrified wood and complement the concrete above, both materials being capable of transformation and change. Widjaja has determined the centre of his work using four mineral bases, each of which is positioned with one side facing north. An extra ‘sound column’, which uses a directional speaker playing recordings of traditional Javanese gamelan instruments, is located between the bases and below the platform. Although centring his works is important to the artist because of his loss of home, the recording has been digitally inverted and reduced to a series of abstract sonic pulses, indicating the artist’s distance from his Javanese identity. Like the Queenslander, Boedi Widjaja tends to ‘touch the earth lightly’ as he moves between houses and countries. The architecture of houses and their aesthetic overlaps across cultures allow Widjaja to examine the psychology of home and belonging in terms of the diaspora experience. Emily Wakeling Endnotes 1 Melanie Pocock and Bala Starr, ‘Interview with Boedi Widjaja’, in Boedi Widjaja: Black—Hut , Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore, p.28. A counterpart to Black—Hut, Black—Hut 2018–19 will be created with Singapore Art Museum in 2019. 2 In 2015, more than 80 per cent of the population lived in HDB public housing; see ‘Public housing: A Singapore icon’, Housing and Development Board , <https://web.archive.org/web/20151010150928/ http://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/about-us/our-role/public-housing- programmes>, viewed June 2018. 3 Pocock and Starr, p.29. 4 Boedi Widjaja, email to the author, 21 June 2018.