The Tukad Kad Sequence #04

Since the 1990s, Yee I-Lann has explored the intersection of personal stories and post-colonial histories. In 2018 she began to produce mats with the Dusun and Murut women of northern Borneo as a way to recenter the narrative of Malaysian history to the indigenous communities of Sabah, where she was born and raised. In doing so, she helped reframe the local ritual of collective weaving within the realm of visual art and developed new patterns with the weavers. Tukad is the name of a weave and tukad kad, a texture described by the weavers as "the ridges at the ceiling of your mouth—when they feel heat or acidity, they become more pronounced."[1] It is interpreted by Yee as a "corporeal threshold between public and private."[2]

Here Yee depicts a ceiling fan, doorway, and black window louvers as colonial imports that have infiltrated the custom of sitting collectively on woven mats. She comments on this rupture of local culture by inserting geometric motifs into a complex system of plaiting and weaving. Throughout the composition, the squiggly patterns—"guik" (worms), in Yee’s terms—negotiate between memories of her indigenous Kadazan grandmother’s weaving patterns and the digital pixels from her previous body of work in design and photography. On the top right, the names of her collaborators, Julitah Kulinting, S. Narty Raitom, Zaitun Raitom, and Julia Ginasius, and her own are woven into the textile.


[1] Yee I-Lann: At the Roof of the Mouth. Silverlens, New York, 2022, unpaginated.

[2] Ibid.