Tea Art

Abstract

This paper sheds light on the operative dynamics of Chinese Contemporary Tea Art, eschewing a formalist reading that equates it with the gongfu ceremony, taking as a jumping-off point instead the Chinese terms that are usually translated into Tea Art: chayi and chadao. I analyze Tea Art through analytics that are raised by its own practitioners, namely the interrelated yet irreducible logics of yi and dao. First, I analyze the yi logic of chayi, demonstrating how the aesthetic register of Tea Art evokes broader, historically rooted ideas about the role of aesthetics as a vector for the moral transformation of society. Second, I turn to the dao logic of chadao, where I illustrate the ways in which Tea Art practice incorporates popular discourses on the interconnectedness of humans and their environment through interpretations of the dao and its adjacent concepts, transforming it into a modality of self-work that reconfigures one’s relationship to self, other, and nature. Third, I place the rise of Tea Art in a sociocultural context to demonstrate that it is neither the revival of an ancient Chinese tradition nor a purely invented tradition but rather a highly complex contemporary phenomenon built at a critical juncture of the Chinese modernization project where urbanites have increasingly pondered issues of spiritual and psychological well-being.