Chinese tea · leopard border, late set
The tea on a late-night stage
Thirty-four Chinese teas set into engraved club posters: a leopard-print border, drawn velvet and brass, a ribbon for the name and the leaf lit centre stage in the smoke.
Chinese tea · leopard border, late set
Thirty-four Chinese teas set into engraved club posters: a leopard-print border, drawn velvet and brass, a ribbon for the name and the leaf lit centre stage in the smoke.
7 teas · 5 categories
The sheet is built like an old club poster: an engraved border, a ribbon for the name, drawn ornament in the corners and one lit object in the middle. Everything around the tea is cross-hatched in the language of steel engraving and printed in sepia, gold and one oxblood red on black, so the photograph of the leaf holds the only real texture in the frame. Chinese tea earns the stage because a charcoal-roasted Wuyi oolong or an aged pu-erh belongs to the end of an evening rather than the start of a morning, and this is the graphic language of late rooms. Leopard print is used as a border and never as a field, which keeps it a frame around the tea instead of a pattern competing with it. The lettering is a shaded serif with spurs arched over the leaf, because an arch is how a poster fits a long name onto its widest line. Nothing drawn here pretends to be photographed and nothing photographed is retouched into a drawing, and the whole composition rests on the reader seeing that difference.