Tulips and Ships Drift Across Jennifer Tee’s Multicultural Canvases

Each spring, Jennifer Tee gathers thousands of tulip petals—not for bouquets, but to craft vibrant collages that echo her Dutch and Indonesian-Chinese roots. Her art draws on the geometric patterns of tampan and palepai textiles from Lampung, Indonesia, merging them with the iconic Dutch tulip, a flower steeped in her family’s history. Tee’s collages are more than floral mosaics: ships, birds, and trees made from petals nod to migration, transformation, and the fleeting nature of life. The ship motif, borrowed from tampan textiles, hints at journeys between worlds—literal and spiritual—as well as her own family’s passage from Indonesia to the Netherlands. Bound by the rhythm of the tulip harvest, Tee creates just two collages a year, emphasizing the tension between ephemerality and preservation. Her works, whether petal originals or refined piezographic prints, become layered meditations on ancestry, ecology, and the invisible threads that connect cultures. In Tee’s hands, tulips are not just flowers—they’re vessels of memory, migration, and meaning. #JenniferTee #ContemporaryArt #CulturalHeritage #Culture