Jayanto Tan

07 February - 06 March      Mantra, I'm a ghost in my own home

Link to artist's website

Jayanto Tan’s installation, Mantra, I’m a ghost in my own home is SLOT's offering in celebration of Chinese New Year.

For Jayanto New Year is an opportunity for celebration. Indeed the Chinese character, Double Happiness that is both the subject and form of his installation is a celebration of marriage. In this case, perhaps it articulates remnant marriages and marriages yet to be forged between Jayanto and his many homes.

Jayanto is Chinese, although he was born in Indonesia, which casts him as a part of many sub-groups including the Peranakan culture. That is the culture of Chinese immigrants who assimilated the Malay culture and in the process established a uniquely hybrid culture expressed in dress, cuisine and architecture. Now Jayanto is also an Australian, a condition that he has wittily summarised with the invention of the Pandan Lamington, pandan being a Malay food additive that turns everything an optimistic green color. Here in the wide brown land a green lamington offers double happiness for sure. One can be found on the left in Jayanto’s finely sculptured ceramic, albeit rendered in monochromatic white.

Here it has been married with other delicacies into a wreath, a European symbol that simultaneously celebrates birth and death as the unity of eternal life.

In response, the Mantra, I'm a ghost in my own home has been deeply considered. As Jayanto observes “the thousands text of ‘Double Happiness’ could read as my mantra for future happiness…Perhaps there is no future!”

Tony Twigg

Jayanto Tan

10 - 28 February      Warung Peranakan Waginem

Link to artist's website

Jayanto Tan makes exquisite installations from unlikely materials, memorably used tea bags and in this instance the spent packing cases of incense sticks. This “threw away” packaging is function first, inadvertently beautiful and when amassed by Jayanto, musical. It sings a song, exotic and familiar that is inescapably, the left overs of Chinese New Year.

Submerged within the surface clatter of his installations are meditations on being that reveal Jayanto’s unfolding autobiography. He wrote of this piece: 

"you visit my grave - my tomb will make you dance. 
- be sure to bring a tambourine.”

                                                                                                                                                          -Rumi

 

It [this work] focuses on themes of remembrance and narrative history that create points of connection between the past and the present, between Fujian Province the Straits of Malacca to the City of Sydney of Peranakan culture. Through discarded objects – emptied incense case Perankan cultures and personal experiences, I created hanging installations that purpose a memorial of connection to my late mother as a gift in Lunar New Year. This is a healing that creates a bridge from the past to a current living that embraces a diverse future in celebration of our contemporary world.

Fujian Province and the Straits of Malacca are exotic sounding places that gave rise to the equally exotic Peranakan culture of the Baba-Nonya, the descendants of Chinese traders who settled through the Malay archipelago before European colonization.  They prospered but more interestingly they assimilated with the Malay culture into an exotic life style expressed in architecture, clothing and food…..some of the most delicious food imaginable.

The Nonya are one of many distinct social groups that are a legacy of the migration to and colonisation of the Malay Archipelago. It is a stark contrast to the Australian experience where history is neatly split into two culture zones - before and after British colonisation. It isn’t like that of course, the Australian experience is constantly shifting but with this “shake of the tambourine” Jayanto seems to be inviting us to join his dance of assimilation.

-Tony Twigg