The Object That Knows What It Is

By Jodi TANG

I have a very specific memory of standing in front of a Peranakan cabinet in a shophouse antique dealer somewhere off Joo Chiat in Singapore, trying to figure out why I couldn't walk away from it.

It wasn't the most beautiful thing in the room. The lacquer was flaking. One of the brass hinges had been replaced with something cheaper, obviously from a different era. But there was something about it that made the other furniture feel hollow by comparison, like the difference between a family photograph and a framed stock image.

I've been thinking about that feeling ever since: when does an object become cultural rather than decorative? My first instinct was to answer with age.

Old things feel cultural because time has done the work of attaching meaning to them. But that can't be right. There are antiques that are just old junk, and there are objects made last year that already feel like they belong to something larger than their function.

Then I thought: provenance. Origin. Cultural objects come from somewhere specific, a tradition, a geography, a lineage of makers. Except plenty of so‑called “ethnic” objects get flattened into decoration the moment they leave their context. A brass incense holder from a temple supply shop in Chinatown does not automatically become cultural just because of where it was made. Lifted out of meaning, it's just an aesthetic prop. A texture, not a text.

Lifted out of meaning, it’s just an aesthetic prop. A texture, not a text.

I keep coming back to the same word: intention. A cultural object is one where a decision was made. Not just a functional decision about what shape, what material, what size, but a decision about what the object is trying to say, and to whom. The Peranakan cabinet was trying to be specific: to a family and to a particular idea about what it meant to occupy space with dignity.

That decision is embedded in the making. You can see it in the details that weren't necessary. The craftsman didn't have to carve a pomegranate into the corner panel. There was no functional reason for it. But it meant fertility, abundance, and the continuation of something. The decoration is the cultural content. It's not ornament for ornament's sake.

The real distinction, then, might be this: legible versus mute. A cultural object has something to say that you can learn to read.

A merely decorative object asks only to be looked at. Somewhere between art school in the US and a handful of European manifestos, we were taught that stripping meaning from objects was the sophisticated move. That our own visual languages were the thing to evolve past. What I've been learning to unlearn is the idea that cultural weight is something applied from outside, by museums, by critics, by the consensus of “good taste.”

Some of the most culturally loaded objects I've encountered have been modest, domestic, unremarkable by every external standard. A ceramic bowl made by a craftsman for his own daily use. A ring passed between women in a family with no documentation and no exhibition history. What made them cultural was that someone made a decision about what they stood for, and that decision survived in the object itself.

It's also the only kind of making that interests me anymore.

There's a version of luxury that understands this, and a version that doesn't. The version that doesn't is the one preoccupied with signals, with being legible as expensive, as rare, as approved. The version that does is quieter, and harder to fake. It asks the maker to be honest about what the object is for, beyond function and beyond status.

When I encounter that kind of object, I feel what I felt in Joo Chiat: a kind of resistance in it. Like it knows what it is, and doesn't need me to confirm it.

That's rarer than it should be. It's also the only kind of making that interests me anymore.