Ancestral Beginnings, Sessile Beings will showcase multiple series of works such as hand-knit floor pieces, ceramics, and pineapple cloth tapestries. But the magnum opus of the exhibition are her Tampan Tulips, which are part of a seasonal serial work Tee has developed for close to a decade. These series of collages are made from pressed tulip petals, with motifs taken from the Tampan, square-shaped woven cloths that were exchanged during important rites of passage. Tampan are found in the Lampung region of southern Sumatra, a crucial trade route since antiquity, a crossroads of cultures and traditions. Predominantly featuring ships with a mast that often branches out into a tree of life, the tampan is evocative of human souls continuing onto new lives. The reference to migration is of particular interest to Tee, as her father migrated with his parents and sister to the Netherlands from Indonesia on a ship in the 1950s. The geometric and mirrored patterns visualize the orders of society as well as the universe and are seen as portals leading from the material to the spiritual world.

Placed in an environment of ceramic domes, knitted floor pieces, and pineapple cloth tapestries, all of Tee’s works point toward the vulnerable relationship between nature and culture, language and perception, beauty and destruction, while exploring how all of these ideas play into questions of land rights, nationality, belonging, and ecology. Her quixotic environments can often be activated, engendering their own rituals. Real worlds and a world in calling thus flow together, both physically and mentally, becoming an important metaphorical binding thread. Therefore, while Tee evokes ideas of migration, Ancestral Beginnings, Sessile Beings exceeds that very notion as she longs to return to or redefine humanity’s place in our natural environment and the cosmos. To behave more like sessile beings, immovable, embedded within ecological time. 

On the occasion of Jennifer Tee’s opening reception, we welcome poet Lara Mimosa Montes to activate Tee’s floorpiece, Crystalline floorpiece / Sanguine Sea. The reading performance is part of Tee’s curated eco-stacks poetry reading, and will take place at 7 PM on Thursday, February 15, 2024. The schedule of next readings that will take place during the exhibition with additional readers is forthcoming.