Jennifer Tee

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Jennifer Tee (b. 1973, Arnhem), Ancestral Beginnings, Sessile Beings.

Jennifer Tee is known for her experimental, interdisciplinary practice, unencumbered by delineations in form. While contemplating cross-cultural identity, loss of language, tradition, and the movement of natural commodities, Tee's work goes beyond – to spiritual realms – refusing essentialization. Tee’s works equally honor the lineage of modernists such as Hilma af Klint, where art and abstraction were a vehicle for occultism, as well as her Chinese-Indonesian and Dutch ancestry.

Ancestral Beginnings, Sessile Beings showcases 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.

For Tee, the conceptual crux of the Tampan series is based on a living, performative cycle that is directed and guided by the environment. Each year, she awaits the tulip harvest, whose yield determines her work. While collages with pressed tulip petals are part of this rhythm, also essential are the piezographies, which are scans of the petal collages. These piezographies for Tee are like x-rays of a body – or a picture of one’s young self memorialized– while the archive tulip petal collage represents the body that is alive and aging. The piezography as a document is further heightened by Tee’s interest and research in systems of language such as hieroglyphics, ancient philosophies, and ethnography. The piezography is akin to messages from another 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.

Jennifer Tee (b. 1973) lives and works in Amsterdam, NL. She was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, NL, and ISCP in New York, US. Tee was awarded the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts, 2020. Recent solo exhibitions include: Still Shifting, Mother Field, Secession, Vienna, AT; DRIFT, multilingual performance choreography, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NL; Ether Plane ~ Material Plane, ISCP, New York, US; Let it Come Down, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, DE; Let it Come Down, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK; Structures of Recollections and Perseverance, Kunstraum, London, UK; Tulip Palepai, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, NL; The Soul in Limbo, 6th Cobra Art Prize, Cobra Museum, Amstelveen, NL; Occult Geometry, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, DK; Practical Magic, Project Art Centre, Dublin, IR; Local Myths, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK; Nameless Swirls, an Unfolding in Presence, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL. Selection of group shows and biennials: Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, TR; 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, BR; Retour sur Mulholland Drive, La Panacée, Montpellier, FR; What people do for money, Manifesta 11, Zurich, CH; The Peacock, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, AT; Six Possibilities for a Sculpture, La Loge, Brussels, BE; Beyond Imagination, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam NL; Secret Societies, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt DE; Nether Land, SICA Dutch Culture Center, Shanghai, CN.