Michelle Liu Carriger - "An Art of Tea? The Japanese Way of Tea in Contemporary Installation and Performance Art"

About this event

Chanoyu, Japanese "tea ceremony," has remained a niche, rarified, and arcane practice in the 21st century, even as matcha, the tea form it preserved for centuries, has become a worldwide fad. Meanwhile, a number of artists, both Japanese and not, have found the aesthetics and gestures of chanoyu compelling for adoption into installation and performance art contexts, with or without matcha. Using examples from Japan, the USA, Australia, and Brazil, I ask: What does recourse to a traditional form do for contemporary artists? How do the arcane, specialized gestures learned by practitioners…

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