Chinese tea · paper, cloth, pigment
Each tea reduced to four painted colours
Thirty-four Chinese teas on handmade paper with raw linen and gouache chips mixed to match the leaf. The palette is the description; the caption is two lines long.
Chinese tea · paper, cloth, pigment
Thirty-four Chinese teas on handmade paper with raw linen and gouache chips mixed to match the leaf. The palette is the description; the caption is two lines long.
3 teas · 3 categories
A moodboard argues by adjacency rather than by sentence: put the leaf next to a painted chip and a torn edge, and the reader draws the conclusion without being told what to feel. Tea is a good subject for it because the useful information really is material — the colour of a dry leaf against the colour of its liquor, whether the surface is matte or lacquered, whether the edges are downy or brittle. So the chips are mixed by hand and painted directly on the paper, and their uneven dry-brushed edges are kept, because a printed swatch would suggest a precision that pigment matching does not have. Linen and handmade paper are in frame for texture comparison, not as props: a white tea covered in silver down belongs beside frayed scrim, and a fermented paste belongs beside something closer to lacquer. Captions stay at two lines so the palette carries the weight. The result is a description a reader can disagree with by looking, which is the point.