About
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Jaee Tee is a Malaysian artist whose practice explores the invisible dimensions of landscape and nature through abstraction. Her work engages with ecological trauma and the subtle forces and rhythms that connect all living things, informed by scientific research and the philosophical framework of New Materialism. Earlier bodies of work focused on cultural identity and mythology rooted in her Chinese heritage. As her practice evolves, she has chosen to narrow her lens—shifting from the personal toward the collective pulse of humanity and the planetary whole.
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Tee primarily works in painting, using a variety of media such as oil, acrylic, natural pigments, and materials collected from the forest to create layered, gestural abstractions. She has also expanded her practice to include installation and Augmented Reality (AR) to deepen the sensory dimensions of her work.
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Tee has exhibited her work in galleries and museums across Asia and Europe, including the Fondazione Luciana Matalon (Milan), Carrousel du Louvre (Paris), the National Art Gallery of the Maldives, and the Yunlin Cultural Affairs Bureau (Taiwan). Her work has been featured in Atlas of Contemporary Art (De Agostini) and was nominated for the prestigious Sovereign Asian Art Prize. She also participated in the high-profile Amber Lounge art event during the Singapore F1 Grand Prix. A Sovereign Asian Art Prize nominee, she was commissioned for cross-disciplinary collaborations with prestigious brands such as McLaren and Banyan Tree Hotels, taking her work beyond galleries and museums.
Artiste Statement
Growing up in rural Malaysia, I spent my childhood roaming my father’s coffee plantations, coming to know the land through scent, colour, and texture. That early immersion in the living landscape taught me to feel its pulse and move in its rhythm.Years later ,witnessing the jagged remains of a 400-million-year-old limestone hill in Kinta Valley blasted apart by extraction, I felt the violence against it. That moment awaken a deep sensitivity that shapes my practice today.
Guided by New Materialism, my work challenges anthropocentrism and seeks to express the invisible vibrancy of the land : its soil, roots and eroded mountains. I trace the wounds of ecological memory like seismic maps of grief, while imagining futures where humans and nature coexist in kinship and reciprocity.My work exists liminal space between memory and material, past and future, loss and regeneration.
My process begins with embodied research of walking through forests or visiting damaged geological sites to attune myself to material, light, and breath. In the studio, my brushstroke becomes a seismograph, capturing the terrain’s memory and subtle rhythms. The cadence of leaves, the murmur of ferns, and the breath of moss emerge as gestural marks, layered textures, and drips pulled gently by gravity.
I position my work within a contemporary discourse of ecological grief and material intelligence. As our landscapes are stripped and silenced, I paint not as resolution, but as a quiet ritual of remembering, holding space for the land’s breath, grief, and becoming.
