Positively engaging art of negatives

LOOKING at history through the lens of a camera takes on new meaning in the hands of Indonesian-born artist Boedi Widjaja, who blends traditional drawing skills with smartphone technology for his current exhibition Imaginary Homeland.

The 10 drawings feature the hand-drawn likenesses of Indonesia's historical leaders that look like film negatives, with their black backgrounds and white strokes. To achieve that negative drawing effect, Widjaja had to look at his strokes through the viewfinder of his iPad while he was drawing, to get the "negative" more detailed so that it looks like a proper positive picture. "Without this camera-aided process, I wasn't able to differentiate the subtle tonal shifts with my naked eye alone," he explains.

The 40-year-old architecture-trained artist's fascination with Indonesia's historical figures stems partly from having been sent to live in Singapore from his hometown of Solo when he was nine by his parents who were concerned about ethnic tensions in the country at the time. "Everything I knew about Indonesia then was based on the photographs in the mass media, not by being physically present there," shares the artist, who is now a Singapore citizen.