Jennifer Tee
Portrait of Jennifer Tee
Jennifer Tee, Tampan Tulip, Seasonal Work, Vienna: Secession / Rotterdam: Kunstinstituut Melly, 2022.
→Jennifer Tee, Structures of Recollection and Perseverance, London, Kunstraum, 2017
→Jennifer Tee, The Soul in Limbo, Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2015.
Still Shifting, Mother Field, Secession, Vienna 16 September – 6 November 2022; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, 20 January – 21 May, 2023.
→Let It Come Down, Camden Arts Centre, London, 2 July – 17 September, 2017.
→Tulip Palepai, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 17 February – 21 May, 2017.
Jennifer Tee: Still Shifting, Mother Field | Vienna Secession, 2023 Artiste multidisciplinaire néerlandaise.
Jennifer Tee embraces a wide range of artistic mediums, engaging in haptic installations, performance, photography and sculpture, all rooted in spiritual philosophies, ancestral knowledge, craft traditions and pre-colonial heritage, drawing from her Dutch-Indonesian background. J. Tee studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, the Sandberg Instituut and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She lives and works in Amsterdam. The city’s lineage as a mercantile and imperial centre over centuries, carrying out oceanic trade and conquests, plays a role in her practice alongside her own family stories. J. Tee’s father travelled to the Netherlands by ship in the 1950s, and her maternal grandfather, an exporter of tulip bulbs, would regularly sail to the United States. The works of J. Tee respond to experiences of cultural hybridity, diasporic memory and how trade routes displace as well as connect people, commodities and objects between geographies.
The artist has long meditated on the notion of the soul as a crossroad to studying cultural ecologies and sacred knowledge systems, through ideas of timekeeping, infinity and finitude, death and afterlife, the individual and the cosmos. Her recent works involve site-responsive sculpture and performance coalescing ecopoetics, the life of trees, migration histories and land rights.
Her encounter with Tampan and Palepai textiles, known as ship cloths by Europeans, led to this long-term inquiry. Reviving emblematic patterns through a collaging process using pressed tulip petals, the artist pays homage to ancestral storylines and recursive journeys. With J. Tee’s series Tampan Tulip, which has been expanding since 2016, the ship becomes a site of transfiguration that resonates as cultural leitmotif and structuring principle, reframing its role in littoral societies beyond maritime power. Tampans reveal the intrinsic correlation between the boatload and the household as social units indicative of both the container and the contained. As ceremonial textiles, the illustrations they carry also connect to the divine sphere. J. Tee reconnects with her Chinese-Indonesian heritage through travels to Sumatra, studying textile collections in imperial collections and collecting tulips during season in the Netherlands.
Her extensive international projects have been presented at the São Paulo Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, Manifesta 11, Zurich, and the Istanbul Biennial. J. Tee has received multiple awards for her work including Amsterdam Prize for the Arts (2020), Cobra Art Prize (2015) and Prix Nouvelles Images (2003). Solo exhibitions of her work were held at Camden Arts Centre, London (2017), Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2017-2018), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2017), Secession, Vienna (2022) and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2023).
A biography produced as part of the +1 programme.
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2024
