Artist Jennifer Tee interweaves personal and cultural histories in six imposing tapestries inspired by palepai and tampan from South Sumatra. These ships’ cloths were used in ceremonies marking transitional rituals around birth, death and marriage. The works were commissioned for the TextielMuseum’s collection.
Tee has spent the last few years researching palepai and tampan, which embody cultural exchange and a long trade history. The cloths are no longer produced. However, examples can be found in several museum collections in the Netherlands, brought back from Indonesia by Dutch colonisers. Recurring motifs in Tee’s tapestries are the ship, the tree of life and the womb.
She also links the tampans with the history of her own Chinese-Indonesian-European family, who migrated from Java to the Netherlands in 1950. In addition, the cloths are a reference to the current flows of refugees, represented by the human figures falling overboard.
In the TextielLab, Tee explored ways to add texture and depth to the geometrical and figurative motifs in her tapestries. She ultimately chose a neutral surface, on which the motifs were applied with thick threads. She also developed a unique colour palette, which was specially twined for the tapestries in the TextielLab.
Tee (Arnhem, 1973) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her work consists mainly of sculpture, installations and performance, in which she investigates the changeability and complexity of existence in which cultures constantly overlap. Material choice and traditional production processes are an important feature of her work. She has had exhibitions in, among others, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Project Arts Centre in Dublin and the São Paulo Biennial. In 2017, she made a large artwork based on a palepai for Amsterdam’s Central Station.
