Boedi Widjaja: Black Hut

Indonesia-born Singaporean artist Boedi Widjaja has designed a major architectural and sound work—a room within a room—that links diverse conceptual references through his own lived experience of migration, culture and aesthetics.

The room takes the form of four dry walls that bisect the painted plasterboard walls and glass façade of the Earl Lu Gallery, creating a new focal point between its three columns. The walls have been rendered with a pigmented concrete, salt and mica mix that will change subtly as it cures over time.

Widjaja’s reference points include the Chinese diaspora, his grandfather’s home in China, his own childhood home in Solo (Surakarta), the architecture of urban Singapore, a groundbreaking 1932 international architecture exhibition, the Black Forest hut in Germany where philosopher Martin Heidegger lived, and the ‘black box turned inside-out’ architecture of the LASALLE McNally campus itself.