Cut-and-paste tea club

Chinese tea · brush, tape and photocopier

The headline drips down over the photograph

Thirty-four Chinese teas laid out as photocopied zine pages, brush-painted headlines, ransom-note captions and hand-drawn frames that never close.

A heap of toasted tartary buckwheat on a photocopied ground, a black brush headline dripping over it, cut-out letters taped in a line below

Seven categories, one photocopier

34 teas · 7 categories

Green teaGreen tea5 teasOolongOolong14 teasRed tea (hongcha)Red tea (hongcha)6 teasPu-erhPu-erh4 teasWhite teaWhite tea2 teasTea paste (chagao)Tea paste (chagao)2 teasBuckwheat (not a tea)Buckwheat (not a tea)1 tea

Wear the cut-out

All tees and hoodies →

Wear — Ālǐshān Zhū Lù CháĀlǐshān Zhū Lù CháWear — Bái JiānBái JiānWear — Passion-Fruit OolongPassion-Fruit OolongWear — Raw Pu-erh PasteRaw Pu-erh PasteWear — Ripe Pu-erh PasteRipe Pu-erh PasteWear — Dà Hóng PáoDà Hóng Páo

Why a tea page was made with tape

Tea is one of the last products still sold with claims of lineage, and a page made from tape and a photocopier declines the whole argument. Cut-out letters make every word visibly assembled, which is a fair description of how tea names travel between Chinese, pinyin and whatever language the buyer speaks. The brush headline is made in one pass and cannot be corrected, so a bad stroke stays on the page. Flat black and one colour is what cheap duplication actually gives you, and the leaf keeps its own colour by being the only photograph in the frame. Slogans in the margins are hand-lettered because typed ones would look like advertising. It is a loud page around a plain object, and the object is graded and named exactly as everywhere else in the network.