Jaee Tee, a Malaysian artist based between Kuala Lumpur and Leipzig, working across painting, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is shaped by an intimate, embodied relationship with the land and by her diasporic heritage as a fourth-generation Chinese Malaysian. From these intertwined perspectives, she develops a cross-cultural visual language that brings Chinese artistic traditions into dialogue with Western abstraction, moving between atmospheric landscapes and mythological imagery to explore collective memory, identity, and belonging. In her site-responsive works, Tee incorporates mineral pigments, stone, sediment, and organic matter, exploring how materials can carry traces of place and time. Tee has exhibited across Asia and Europe, including at Fondazione Luciana Matalon in Milan, Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, the National Art Gallery of the Maldives, and Yunlin Cultural Affairs Bureau in Taiwan. Her work has appeared in Atlas of Contemporary Art and was nominated for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Tee was an artist-in-residence at the Leipzig International Art Programme and presented a solo exhibition in Augsburg, Germany. Selected commissions and brand collaborations include projects with McLaren, Park Hyatt Kuala Lumpur, Billecart-Salmon, Banyan Tree, and Pavilion Damansara Heights. In an ongoing body of work, Jaee Tee returns to the Chinese zodiac as a living visual archive, considering how inherited symbols and mythology are passed through generations and geographies, retaining cultural resonance while acquiring new meanings. Through gestural brushwork, layered washes, erasure, and tonal contrast, Tee allows the zodiac figure to hover between recognition and abstraction. Drawing on Xie Yi – the expression of inner vitality rather than outward likeness – she treats it as an energetic presence rather than a descriptive image. Between Wave And Sky is a diptych structured through tonal reversal. In the white panel, Tee draws on Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, shaping the dragon’s curling body through the movement of a cresting wave. In the dark-blue panel, it assumes a more visible, calligraphic presence. Across the diptych, fluid brushwork and translucent washes destabilise the boundary between creature and atmosphere: is the dragon emerging from wave, cloud, and sky, or dissolving into these forces? Extending beyond Tee’s own experience as a fourth-generation Chinese Malaysian, the diptych asks a wider diasporic question: when heritage changes across geographies and generations, does it become a new identity – or reveal that identity was never fixed to begin with?