Rêmên has been awarded a 2025 LIT Lighting Design Award in the Decorative Accent Lamp category for its ROH Table Lamp, marking a significant moment for the Jakarta-based studio as it gains international visibility.
Founded in 2025, Rêmên focuses on translating cultural narratives into contemporary objects, positioning its work between design, craft, and storytelling. The ROH Table Lamp reflects this approach, treating material not only as a formal element but as a carrier of meaning. Designed by Sylviana Putri, the lamp incorporates Chinese burial coins historically used in funerary practices. These coins were intended to accompany the dead—objects tied to transition, protection, and passage. In this setting, the coins are neither restored to their original function nor fully absorbed into a neutral material language. Instead, they remain legible as cultural artifacts, carrying their associations into a new context where they are continuously on display. Their presence introduces a quiet friction between past use and present function, without attempting to reconcile the two.
At the center of the lamp is a red, hand-blown glass core representing “ROH,” or the unseen spirit. It functions as both light source and focal point, surrounded by the coins which act almost as a porous boundary. The composition suggests a threshold rather than a container. Light passes through, but not evenly. The coins interrupt, filter, and frame it. What is typically hidden—both symbolically and materially—is partially revealed. This approach aligns with Rêmên’s broader interest in how objects carry layered cultural meanings, and how those meanings shift when placed in new contexts. Formally, the lamp remains restrained. Its structure is compact, its geometry legible. The emphasis falls on material contrast: dark-coated steel, oxidized coin surfaces, and the saturated red of the glass. Rather than dramatizing the concept through form, the design relies on the tension between materials—between what is preserved, what is illuminated, and what is left ambiguous.
The LIT Award highlights lighting projects that combine visual presence with conceptual clarity, and Rêmên’s selection places the studio within a growing group of designers engaging with cultural memory through contemporary objects. For Rêmên, the recognition reinforces a direction already established in its early work: using design not only to produce objects, but to revisit and reframe cultural artifacts that risk becoming detached from their original context.
The ROH Table Lamp, produced in a limited edition and priced at around $3,000, reflects that position—an object that operates as much through what it carries as through what it shows.