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Fusion Between West and East:
A Modern Narrative of Tea and Coffee
If we call my experience with sculpture and
calligraphy a collision between western and eastern
cultures, then tea and coffee somehow also represent
differences between the two cultures. Maybe I am born
as a fun guy, I never plan to be a “good boy”, always
eager to break the traditional boundary of tea and find
a broader world...
We live in a brand-new world, where the east and
the west, and the modern and the traditional coexist.
It is also an era full of unparalleled conflicts and op-
portunities. How can tea, a key medium in Chinese
traditional fancy events, be fun today? Maybe the
answer will be clearer in the western context. That’s
why I assigned myself a “homework task”: learn some-
thing about coffee, jump between coffee and tea, and
see what I will get.
Tea and coffee have been a necessary ceremony
in our daily life. Deciding to know about coffee, I felt
like I traveled from the east to the west, and viewed
the eastern world with a western eye. Some shining
sparks will no doubt show up in the collision. We are
in an era never seen before, which allows us to know
both ourselves and each other and to encounter new
things with expectations. Wonderful stories will be
created in this process.
How Can Tea Be Fun?
“I Wanna Be a Saboteur.”
How to play? This is not easy! For the “artist”,
creating a new narrative and expression is what he is
after. In the six or seven years of ups and downs in the
tea industry, he has been seeking the new possibilities
to save tea in modern times, and exploring and expand-
ing the boundaries of tea.
“I was born in the west.” “You were born in the
east.” Though civilization retains unique charm and
freedom, it leads us to think that we, as a collective,
will go to a world with a shared future.
In this world, I will not obey certain rules to be
a rigid man. One night, I was thinking of something
that I have forgotten, but I wrote in my memo: BE A
SABOTEUR. With no courage to break the state, it
would be impossible to march. I don’t know what it
will end up with, but I firstly should allow it to be
different in my head.
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