Tampan, 2013

Jennifer Tee (1973, the Netherlands) is a Dutch artist of Chinese-Indonesian descent who engages with issues of cultural identity in a world in which disparate cultures are constantly overlapping and interacting, creating new and uncharted common ground. The jars with coiled ceramic cones entitled ‘Heart Felt’ call various images to mind, ranging from ice-cream cones to Egyptian urns used for carrying organs into the afterlife. ‘Tampan’, made entirely of dried and pressed tulip petals, is patterned after Tampan Sumatran Ship Cloths: woven cloths used for ritual occasions marking the passage of life. Tee’s use of the tulip, iconic to Dutch culture but originally from Persia, in combination with Indonesian imagery speaks to modern-day complexities of migration and cultural identity.