Doubly Displaced

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I first met Boedi Widjaja at the Dome cafe in the Singapore Art Museum. It was surprising to both of us how quickly we fell into easy conversation. Because of racial tensions in Indonesia in the early 1980's, his parents sent him and his sister to Singapore to live apart from them. He was just nine years old and he did not know a jot of English, having grown up speaking Bahasa Indonesia. Singapore was alienating and he longed for home. At our meeting, I was living away from home too, having transplanted myself from Singapore to New York. Migration is, we discovered, the keynote of my poetry and his art. Both of us are sons of Chinese diaspora who have not just settled in one new place, but having made the place home, have moved again. We are doubly displaced.

As our friendship grew, so did our appreciation for each other's work. I attended his art shows in Singapore, where his intensity in live-art performance was gripping, and he attended my poetry readings. He kindly gave permission for the use of his work on not just one but two of my book covers. An image from his lovely mark-making series "SUNGAI, SEJARAH 河流，历史，源" (2012) graces the front of my book Steep Tea (2015). My collection of essays Bite Harder (2018) faces the world with an image from his series "DRAWING CAGE" (2013). We wanted closer collaboration, and so we proposed a joint live-art performance to the Singapore Writers Festival one year, but that idea fell through unfortunately.

So it is with great excitement that I think about the opening of his debut solo show in NYC this week, at Helwaser Gallery, and about our joint artist performance for the show this Saturday. What couldn't happen in Singapore is happening in NYC. "Threshold I" involves a literal exchange of roles and places; it involves poetry reading and rock tracing. How are the two activities related? We have no prior or fixed answers, but are open to the living moment of interaction with the audience. Come with questions.

Jee Leong Koh
September 12, 2019

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