Chinese tea · oxblood, plaster, typewriter
Printed on something already worn
Thirty-four Chinese teas as worn posters — oxblood and charcoal on cracked plaster, an arched roman headline, and typewriter fragments running down both margins.
Chinese tea · oxblood, plaster, typewriter
Thirty-four Chinese teas as worn posters — oxblood and charcoal on cracked plaster, an arched roman headline, and typewriter fragments running down both margins.
7 teas · 5 categories
Age is the subject, so the surface carries it: plaster that has already cracked, ink that has already broken, holes where something was nailed up and taken down. Two colours do the work — oxblood and charcoal — and neither is laid down solid, which keeps the page from looking manufactured this morning. The typewriter margins are set narrow on purpose, four or five words a line, so they read at the speed of a note rather than a caption. Chinese tea is the one product where this is not nostalgia for its own sake: ripe pu-erh is a thing that was buried under damp cloth and left, rock oolong is roasted in cycles over weeks, and both taste of time passing rather than of freshness. The engraved rose and the ink-wash mountain stay flat and one colour so they behave as stamps, not illustrations. The leaf is always a photograph pressed into the texture, because the one thing that must not look aged or invented is the tea.