This portrait depicts a Peranakan Chinese woman wearing a silk dark baju kurung with her hair tied by in a sanggul (the Baba Malay word for hair bun). The baju kurung was a dress used by Peranakan Chinese and other Indonesian communities at the time, particularly Peranakans from Java. For Chinese Peranakans, ancestral portraits do not just seek to commemorate a death but serves the function of extending the presence of the deceased beyond death.
