Michelle Liu Carriger - "An Art of Tea? The Japanese Way of Tea in Contemporary Installation and Performance Art"

Chanoyu, Japanese “tea ceremony,” has remained a niche, rarified, and arcane practice in the 21st century, even as matcha, the tea form it preserved for centuries, has become a worldwide fad. Meanwhile, a number of artists, both Japanese and not, have found the aesthetics and gestures of chanoyu compelling for adoption into installation and performance art contexts, with or without matcha. Using examples from Japan, the USA, Australia, and Brazil, I ask: What does recourse to a traditional form do for contemporary artists? How do the arcane, specialized gestures learned by practitioners translate—or not—from tatami to the gallery? Artists include fine and performance artists who adapt chanoyu aesthetics, as well as tea practitioners who have experimented with more gallery- and art-focused presentations in distinction to traditional practice: Mariko Mori, Tom Sachs, Matthew Barney, Yumi Umiumare (a Dairakudan Butoh alumna now based in Australia), Maho Ogawa (NYC choreographer), Adam Wojcinski (Australia/France), Sōryō Matsumura (Shuhally studio, Tokyo), Izumi Reijiro (grandson of the 15th-generation Urasenke iemoto and scion of Sabie, a series of modernized tea events in public and private venues), and Erika Kobayashi (Brazil).

This event is part of the Ito Center's Japanese Food Culture and Culinary Traditions Speaker Series

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About the Speaker

Michelle Liu Carriger is an associate professor of Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA with a PhD from Brown University. Her first book, Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance and Subjectivity Between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan (2023), was the winner of the Barnard Hewitt Award from ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research). Other publications consider pedagogy during wildfire and active-shooter lockdown, Japanese street fashion, cheerleaders in musicals, Victorian sex scandals, historical reenactment, kimono, and cultural appropriation. A longtime practitioner of chanoyu (“Japanese tea ceremony”) with the tea name (chamei) Sōmi, Michelle’s current book project analyzes tea practice in international circulation, from which this talk’s materials are drawn.\