Chinese tea · gold line, velvet, wax
Thirty-four Chinese teas set inside hand-drawn gold — a hairline lozenge on white, a carved frame on black velvet. The leaf stays a flat photograph; the ornament is built around it.
3 teas · 3 categories
Ornament here is not laid on top of the product, it is the container the product sits in. The filigree runs as one unbroken hairline, thin enough that it never competes with the leaf, and the leaf is never illustrated — it is photographed flat and left alone. Chinese tea already arrives inside its own ceremony of tins, seals and paper wrappers, so a gilt frame repeats a grammar the tea has rather than inventing one for it. The two grounds do different work: white keeps a green tea legible down to the individual bud, black velvet lets gold buds and gold ink meet. Red appears once per composition, as a bead or a wax seal, which makes it a mark of authorship instead of a colour scheme. Everything in this shop is slow because the drawing is slow.