Roh Table Lamp by Remen Earns 2025 LIT Award

Remen has received a 2025 LIT Lighting Design Award in the Decorative Accent Lamp category for its Roh Table Lamp, a Jakarta-made piece that reframes ancient Chinese burial coins found across Java into a contemporary object.

Rather than chasing the usual “look at me” posture of accent lighting, the Roh Table Lamp works through restraint. The design’s impact comes from material honesty and narrative weight, not exaggerated geometry. At its center sits a hand-blown red glass core, positioned as the lamp’s visual anchor and symbolic heart.

A lamp built around the idea of Roh

Roh refers to “the unseen spirit,” and the lamp translates that idea into a lantern-like silhouette associated with guiding presence and passage. The red glass core is not treated as decoration, but as a conceptual nucleus: a warm, concentrated element that suggests something sensed rather than explained.

This approach makes the piece legible even without background context. You can read it as a calm lighting object first, then discover it as a story carrier. That order matters, because it keeps the lamp from becoming a museum prop and lets it stay functional in a home setting.

Reinterpreting Chinese burial coins found in Java

The burial coins embedded in the lamp are historically tied to beliefs about guiding souls to the afterlife. In many contemporary contexts, they are seen mainly as archaeological objects, detached from living meaning. The Roh Table Lamp repositions them as active design elements, asking whether cultural objects can re-enter daily life without losing their dignity.

The coins also hold a deliberate contradiction: fortune in the afterlife, misfortune in the world of the living. By placing that tension at the center of a domestic lamp, the design nudges viewers to notice how symbolism shifts across time, geography, and personal belief.

Material honesty and cultural sustainability

One of the most specific choices here is what Remen does not do. The coins are preserved in original condition, including their natural green patina, with minimal intervention to maintain authenticity. Upcycling, in this context, is not about making something look new, but about keeping material evidence intact.

Production leans on local metalwork and hand-blown glass, with artisans responsible for key components instead of industrial mass output. That decision ties sustainability to craft continuity and local capability, not only to material efficiency.

Why the 2025 LIT win matters for a young brand

The LIT Lighting Design Award, organized by 3C Awards in Switzerland, draws international entries and recognizes lighting with strong presence and conceptual clarity. For a brand that launched in February 2025, this win functions as a credibility checkpoint: the design language is not just locally meaningful, but also globally readable.

Remen has indicated it will continue building collections that translate cultural heritage into functional objects, including explorations that combine human characteristics with Indonesian local wood carving. The Roh Table Lamp is also positioned as a limited item, with a suggested price of USD 3,012.89, reinforcing its role as a collectible design object rather than a mass-market product. Sylviana Putri Sunario Soegondo and Remen frame the award as motivation to keep cultural storytelling at the center of future work.