Nanyang and Jawa, archival prints on paper, present Boedi Widjaja’s visual writing system that translates cultural memory into genetic language. Drawing on structural affinities between cosmological scripts and molecular code, these works align the twenty-letter Javanese Hanacaraka alphabet and the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching with the genetic system of twenty amino acids and sixty-four DNA triplets.

In this system, DNA becomes both medium and syntax: a code through which fractured histories are recombined within a biomolecular framework. Through these works, Boedi binds memory and genetic code into a single visual script.

Nanyang (2019) encodes excerpts from the artist’s grandfather’s letters to his children, written in the final years of his life.

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