Chinese tea · one rule, one object
Small in the middle of a large sheet
Thirty-four Chinese teas photographed one at a time on ivory paper, inside a single hairline rule, with the name reduced to a whisper in the corner.
Chinese tea · one rule, one object
Thirty-four Chinese teas photographed one at a time on ivory paper, inside a single hairline rule, with the name reduced to a whisper in the corner.
3 teas · 2 categories
The design is one rule and a lot of paper, and the only decision left is how small the object should be. Setting the leaf small forces you to walk up to it, which is the opposite of what a shop usually asks for and exactly right for something you are meant to examine. There is no logotype worth the name: a lowercase word in the corner marks the page, and the caption at the bottom gives the hanzi and the pinyin and stops. Everything is toned to one warm brown so the paper, the hairline and the tea read as a single material. Chinese tea can hold this much silence because the objects are strange on their own — a knot of compressed clumps, a resin cube, a twisted rock-oolong leaf need no arrangement to be interesting. Leaving the rest of the sheet empty is also a promise about the writing: nothing here will be described more loudly than it deserves. When a page has one object on it, you cannot hide a weak one.