TEA PARTY
Collaborative Statement by the artists
World Tea Party, as a continuing fête éternel,* came out of a concern to develop a dialogue among artists and cultures around the world. The three of us, Daniel Dion, Suschnee and I founded an Organization for pancultural exchange and realization of art: OPERA in 1990, to stimulate a process of global cultural interaction. Each artist had been involved in the Canadian artist-run movement and felt it was time to expand the process to a global network. Exchanging ideas with many cultures inspired concepts for a work that was inclusive while exemplifying the process of dialogue. When the national gallery of Canada proposed a survey of Daniel's video installations with an invitation to produce a new piece, Daniel asked Su and me to join him in creating a work that incorporated concerns for pancultural expression, utilizing interactive technology.
World Tea Party has assembles a format for the pancultural which includes a multiplicity of histories, traditions, artistic disciplines and social rituals. Tea drinking is an activity in which most people have personal experience. From its roots in China, tea has spread around the world over the last two millennia, to be the most common human refreshment after water.
Since the first World Tea Party during the summer of 1993 the Party has evolved into an on-going series of events in which the arts of human exchange are manifest around the simple act of sharing a cup of tea. The history of tea reveals a cornucopia of aesthetics, cultural , and spiritual traditions of human interaction. While rituals of drinking tea vary, the conviviality of meeting to partake in a stimulating beverage remains fundamental to the core of civilization.
World Tea Party has assembled archives on video disc of tea-related photography, painting, ceramics, "china", movie clips, television ads and the artists' own video visits to the tea gatherings of the world. Digital image archives are presented on multiple video monitors, along with CD Rom multi-channel sound files of world tea salon music compositions by Marc Patch. This is achieved through computer controlled interactive systems that respond to the numbers and activities of guests assembled in the actual tea rooms of the installation. Uniting the virtual world of digital image and sound with actual art works, collections, meetings and conversations around the rituals of tea, World Tea Party allows the transcultural nature of the world's histories, cultures and spiritual practices to come into focus. Through internet connections and 'world wide web' tea sites the interactive process is extended globally.
World Tea Party at Presentation House Gallery included , for the first time, active involvement of community groups sharing their tea traditions. The Greater Vancouver Region offers one of the most multifarious cultural communities in the modern world. The tea party was transformed daily by the arrival of special guests bringing their way of tea. Special events started with Vincent Sze's introduction to Chinese methods of tea preparation in the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden. The Gallery's opening reception featured the Fools Society enacting the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. Many guests rose to the offer of prizes for the best tea attire. Dolly Watts, family and friends of the Liliget Feast House hosted a First Nations tea feast with indigenous herbal teas and delicacies accompanied by West Coast Native storytelling. Every Thursday the local Urasenke Japanese Tea School served whipped green Cha-No-Yu style tea to everyone who entered the gallery. There were Sufi teas with whirling dervish dances and sacred Sufi music, poetry readings, tea trade talks and tastings; performance artist Ray Fuse painted calligraphy with green tea; local societies, elders activity groups, school and neighborhood groups came to special tea gatherings. The Gallery became a public/private tea room where all communities and traditions had an honoured place.
