On second thought

Review of ‘On the cusp’

By Eric Lim Jit Kai

Electric fans on a digital screen spanning the entire wall of a walkway. A quirky and somewhat otherworldly-looking structure in the middle of a lawn. At the edge of the lawn, a serene but modern-looking pavilion: part laboratory, part exhibition gallery.

At first glance, the title of NTU Museum’s exhibition On the cusp (2026) bewildered me. On the cusp of what? The answer would soon emerge.

The artworks in the show blur the lines between medium and subject. To borrow a quote from American philosopher Alfred Korzybski, the map is not the territory. This notion is subverted at each installation. Turn On by Tromarama is a video installation depicting wind interacting with everyday objects. They quiver, blown off surfaces, with the screen even transforming into a flapping cloth. I often perceived a gentle breeze that may have been imagined or real. Torlarp Larpjaroensook’s Cosmos of Nostalgia was a spaceship that transported me to a different planet even though it was on the lawn. At Boedi Widjaja’s 东邪西毒 I Want to Infect You with History, I inhaled an aerosolised poem encoded as DNA, simulating an infection. The actual presence of genetic material did not matter, as the idea of infection had already infected me.

This segues into an overarching theme of the exhibition: quiet rebellion. In a video displayed at the pavillion, Widjaja recounts stories of a struggle to preserve his heritage. The poem is written in his cultural language, the Hanacaraka script. The twenty letters are assigned to corresponding amino acids, each with a three-nucleotide DNA encoding. By misting this DNA poem, there are no cries of protest nor violent uprisings. The entry into the body is subtle. Similarly, as I sat at the benches facing Turn On, it was intriguing to see how many people simply walked past it. It does not demand attention, but its message lingers at the walkway, almost imperceptibly. The structure at Cosmos of Nostalgia looks like one from a playground, benign and harmless. Yet, within it, paintings of traditional figures are juxtaposed with space-age machines. The contrast challenges the distinction between art and science, another quiet rebellion.

Being a PhD student of biomedical informatics at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Associate Professor Eric Yap is the scientific collaborator for the DNA artwork. It is serendipitous that my thesis topic is on the transmission of bacterial antibiotic resistance, which found reflections in the themes of cultural transmission in Widjaja’s artwork. Connecting to the theme of quiet rebellion, it was as though the poem being encoded in DNA was resisting cultural erasure in its own way. Biological transmission may be benign or malignant. In this case, it did not appear to evoke an immune response or result in pathological effects. I also saw defiance in the blending of the boundaries of art and science, by leveraging the ability of DNA to form various shapes and structures in solution.

This exhibition is proof of how science and technology can complement art, rather than erase it. It is a striking experiment on how art can exist in spaces and carry their messages in new and intriguing ways. Here, I found the art right on the cusp of the transition between domains. History resisted fading into obscurity with the use of modern technology, the digital world reached into the physical, and tradition contrasted with visions of the future. Echoing DNA transmission, the messages of the exhibition lodge into minds and mutate, having a life of their own upon further contemplation. Like in Welsh writer Dylan Thomas’ poem, the art in their own little ways "Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. As long as culture persists, the number of ways that art can be created are seemingly endless.

Infection Advisory

by Snehal Bhadani

A transparent bottle lies in front of me. On its duct-tape label, in hurried handwriting, are the words: “DNA Solution. Do not Drink!”—because DNA does not survive through ingestion, only through inheritance.

As a gallery sitter at Nanyang Lake Pavilion, I take the liberty of sitting with the work of Boedi Widjaja, an Indonesian-born Singaporean artist. I seek to understand how observers interact with, react to, and unknowingly inherit his work, which, with the turn of time, might be passed down as memory—or as something more deeply embodied—to their own offspring, if Widjaja’s supposition that our DNA carries our memory and history is true.

‘I Want to Infect You with History’ treats the human body as an archive for histories that have been displaced, erased, or denied institutional space. Widjaja’s practice is shaped by movement across national and cultural borders, and by the daily frictions of translation between languages, scripts, and what families keep in private versus what institutions certify in public. His work returns to how identity is carried in accent and vocabulary, in inherited gestures, and in the selective amnesia of official history. Widjaja proposes that when histories lack official records or have been omitted through dispossession or displacement, they can still survive as part of our genetic code, and thereby propagate across generations. He literalises that intuition through a bilingual poem in English and Bahasa Indonesia.

Working with geneticist Dr. Eric Yap, he developed a biocultural cipher. He transliterated each letter phonetically into the Javanese script Hanacaraka, and then mapped each letter to a specific amino acid [1]. The resulting sequence was cultured in bacterial colonies for display. The installation conveys its premise through different modes of encounter: petri dishes containing the encoded material, a filmed conversation with Dr. Yap, testimony from Widjaja’s father, an outdoor table where dishes sit exposed to the elements of nature, and, most pointedly, a room where visitors are invited to be ‘infected’ with the DNA solution.

Only the truly daring step into the ‘infection advisory’ area. Here, Widjaja invites visitors to spray themselves with the DNA solution: distilled water mixed with drops of lab-extracted genetic material. An automated system releases a fine spray every fifteen minutes, and visitors can also spray themselves directly using the bottle in the room. The table-and-bottle setup is simple, almost casual; the reactions are not. A few visitors step forward quickly, curious or amused. Most stop at the threshold, laugh nervously, and retreat. In this way, the exhibit also stages Widjaja’s point about agency. If memories are already circulating through us, this work asks what it means to accept new ones knowingly, even circumstantially.

I find myself encouraging visitors to try the experience, because I believe that memory strengthens through enactment, and the body participates in encoding, retrieving, and reshaping what we remember. To read about an artwork online is to keep it at a safe distance. To stand in a gallery is already different: the body adjusts to space, light, and the awareness of being among others. But to enter the infection room is a different feat altogether. One becomes, temporarily, a “human vector”, returning home full of stories to tell. To me, this is the most powerful way to internalise the memory and the message of the artist.

Outside the climate-controlled environment of the gallery, Widjaja’s concern with mutation becomes more literal. Petri dishes containing DNA that encodes lines of bilingual poetry lie exposed to the atmosphere, open to dust, moisture, UV, and microbial contact. I choose not to wipe away the rainwater or pollen that settles on the lids of these dishes, because I do not believe the artist would want anyone to. My duty is simply to let the work be, and not to interfere with it. Nature, by nature, evolves automatically.

This is where Widjaja’s central paradox sharpens: DNA as archive is both durable and unstable. While ancient DNA has been recovered from fossils hundreds of thousands of years old under favourable storage conditions, DNA left unprotected in ambient environments can degrade quickly, over months or years, depending on conditions, through strand breaks and chemical damage such as UV-induced lesions, oxidation, and hydrolysis [2, 3]. DNA stability is therefore fundamentally constrained by storage and handling conditions [4]. Widjaja’s work embodies this tension. His poem, encoded into DNA and placed in petri dishes, is made to persist, yet also deliberately exposed to alteration—whether through accidental damage, contamination, or natural mutation. This underscores the idea that inheritance is actively shaped by what air, weather, and time deposit on us.

What strikes me most is how the work operates across multiple timescales at once. There is the immediate sensory time of the spray—the tiny moment of decision at the threshold, the brief chill on skin, and the awareness of one’s own hesitation. There is the slow accumulation of mutations in the petri dishes as time passes. And there is a larger time, on the scale of ancestry and inheritance, the long braid of history carried forward as a bodily disposition. Widjaja’s ‘infection’ travels through all these media simultaneously, refusing to remain metaphor alone.

Time will pass, as it always has. I may forget the specific people who walked in, or the particular conversations we shared, but I will remember, collectively, the experience of sitting. In five years, it will be a faint, happy memory. In ten, perhaps a vague feeling embedded in my being. But it will exist somewhere, in some form, as Widjaja suggests, through “the act of remembering, misremembering, and remaking.” The exhibition offers the recognition that we are already infected with histories we cannot fully read or recall, and that we transmit them forward regardless. All we can decide is which infections we pursue willingly, and how we hold space for others to encounter them on their own terms.

by Celine Tan