ShanghART Gallery 香格纳画廊
中文

Kang Ouw, 江湖水土
BOEDI WIDJAJA 黄晨晗
2022
multi-channel video
4-channel moving image and 1-channel sound
20 minutes 43 seconds | 1 12 minutes 47 seconds | 2 17 minutes 24 seconds | 3 20 minutes 43 seconds | 4 14 minutes 47 seconds | Sound 30 minutes 20 seconds
Edition of 3 + 1AP
BW_0686

In this 4-channel moving-image and single-channel sound work, artist Boedi Widjaja assembles film stills of figures, landscapes, and texts extracted from Dragon Inn (1967, dir. King Hu) and New Dragon Gate Inn (1992, dir. Raymond Lee, prod. Tsui Hark). Through inversion with camera lenses, the images are abstracted—flickering, dislocated, and reconstituted into new visual rhythms. The work becomes a meditation on the diasporic gaze: the act of looking across distances, toward an imaginary elsewhere shaped by longing and cinematic memory.

The sound composition layers recordings of a century-old gamelan—once housed in the Surakarta Palace, later relocated to the Museum Nusantara in Delft. Following the pulse of Morse code, 160 sound files are organised by duration to encode Li Bai’s 《侠客行》 (Xia Ke Xing) through the transformation of Chinese telegraphic code into Morse code. The resulting algorithmic sequence turns transmission into an act of listening—echoing across time, place, and displacement.

Related Exhibitions:
The View within the View: Boedi Widjaja, Lv Yan, Zhang Wenxin, ShanghART WB Central, Shanghai 11.14, 2025 -02.01, 2026
Kang Ouw, Esplanade Tunnel, Singapore‍ 01.14, 2022 -05.01, 2022


Related Texts:
Insights: Boedi Widjaja - Encoding the cultural experiences of a diaspora TEXT 2022-03-07