Chinese tea · built from bricks
The name is built, brick by brick
Thirty-four Chinese teas set on brick baseplates in red, yellow, blue and green, with every name and every character spelled out in studs.
Chinese tea · built from bricks
Thirty-four Chinese teas set on brick baseplates in red, yellow, blue and green, with every name and every character spelled out in studs.
3 teas · 3 categories
Everything here is placed on the same square grid, which turns out to be a fair way to show tea. A brick is a unit, so the baseplate under a pile of leaf reads as a ruler: you can see how much there is without a scale bar. Both the pinyin and the hanzi are assembled from the same pieces, which puts the two writing systems at exactly the same weight instead of demoting the Chinese to a footnote. Primary red, yellow and blue are the wrong colours for tea in every other language, and that is why they work here — they never pretend to be leaf, so the only natural colour on the page is the tea. Steam is built rather than retouched, so nothing in the picture claims to be a photograph of a brewing tea. Light is flat and even, the way a toy is shot, which means a Longjing shows its blade shape and a shu pu-erh shows its gloss. Assembly is the honest part: bricks come apart, and so does a claim.