Chinese tea, engraved and charted
The leaf sits at the centre of the chart
Thirty-four Chinese teas set inside inked zodiac wheels, columns and rams, with one acid olive green running through the black line.
Chinese tea, engraved and charted
Thirty-four Chinese teas set inside inked zodiac wheels, columns and rams, with one acid olive green running through the black line.
7 teas · 5 categories
Everything here is drawn with a pen rather than set on a grid: torn paper edges, hatched columns, rams caught mid-leap, a wheel of tick marks around the goods. The engraving does the work a photo studio usually does, so the leaf can stay a plain overhead photograph in the middle and still look placed. One acid olive green is the only colour allowed to break the black line, which keeps the page from reading as an antique reproduction. Chinese tea suits this because it already arrives with a chart attached: a season, a mountain, a grade, a year. The zodiac wheel is not a claim about the tea, it is a frame that admits the tea is being measured. On the dark pages the same drawing turns gold and the leaf reads as the one real object in a room of symbols.