2. Jayanto Tan

The Chest of Silence: Tart’s Tea Party in The Garden of Celestial City

ceramic, found wooden chest

Transcription

Hi! My name is Jayanto Tan. I'm a visual artist who lives on Gadigal Wangal Country in the Inner West of Sydney. I was born and raised in a small town in North Sumatra to a Sumatran-Christian mother and Guandong-Taoist father. My practice draws on my personal family history and diasporic background, blending Eastern and Western mythologies with the contemporary world and current events. Using found objects, ceramic sculptures, authentic food, drawings, interactive performance, and installation, my work often investigates how hybrid cultures can create new identities of possibility and hope. 

The title of my work for HIDDEN this year is The Chest of Silence or Tart’s Tea Party in the Garden of Celestial City. The work is about Australian migrants' history and Chinese diaspora during the gold rush, white supremacy, and colonialism. I am planning to make numerous ceramic food of mini tarts on plates that are influenced by Mei Quong Tart’s café menus. Mei Quong Tart was one of the most famous and well-known personalities and made a significant impact on the social and political scene of the City of Sydney. He owned a network of tea rooms in the Sydney Arcade, the Royal Arcade, and King Street. His crowning success was the ‘Elite Hall’ in the Queen Victoria Market, now the Queen Victoria Building in the 1880s. 

I am thinking of transferring the idea of past history to current history by making several plates from Quong Tart’s menus like the famous Scones, creamy Kiwi Tarts, Ladyfinger Sandwiches, Egg Tarts, Sweet Buns and more. I will also use a found wooden chest in beige colour to display the ceramic food on top that occupied the bench surface. I hope the work will relate and speak to the Australian or Chinese-Australian audience in their own personal story. Hopefully, this work will shine on the site and transform the location into an 'Elite Hall' tea party ceremony on the street.

This installation draws inspiration from my family traditions that I have experienced in everyday life — the ritual of offering food made by my mother for my dead father. The tarts displayed are reflections on my childhood and upbringing imbued with a sentimental emotional values that are united with the current residents, Mr. Quong Tart and his family in the Rookwood Sleeping City. Sensitive and sensual at the same time, these works are about sharing, friendship, family, and neighbourhood. The tea party is a fabulous celebration that any civilisation of people can experience and is here rendered as a collection of memorials — ‘still-life soul-food’ — and offered as an everyday ritual in our contemporary Australia. It is a simple and quiet  but very potent and colourful way of suggesting thoughts about community; about how people come together and share life. It is offered as a space for ritual, mediation, healing, and time through a contemporary art practice. This is a reminder of the good times with loved ones and fond memories of togetherness.