Stepping outside of the tea house.

Fast forward to, I think about 15 or 16 generations, I first recalled watching a talk on youtube given by Sen no Rikyu’s great great… great grandchild, contemporary tea master Sen So-Oku (千 宗屋). The video was titled:

When I built my own tea room a few year ago, I had studied the tea room that architect designer Hiroshi Sugimoto had built for his own New York home. And the names of the artists in the title of the video were at least vaguely familiar to me, visually and conceptually. It was in this video, I first saw the glass tea hous Mondriane, Venice.

Seeing Sugimoto’s glass tea hous Mondriane, was a like getting approval from an authoritative figure to create tea house that is me. For Sugimoto, his quest for abstraction led him tracing back from Mondrian to Rikyu. He believed Tai-an tea house was an exemplary distillation of abstraction that aligns with his aesthetics.

In Duchamp, and his act of appropriation was discussed, as a form of art itself. Then I vaguely recalled in John Cage’s book, when he discussed Duchamp. Then BOOM, the tea house I was trying to exit, is almost like, in my speculative imagination: when Cage first entered an anechoic chamber. In a way, I felt Tai-an was built to keep external noises out of it, so that the guests find his peace in tea. As was the anechoic chamber was designed to keep noise out of it and reverberation from happening inside it.

So I’ve heard, the origin of inspiration of 4'33", was Cage stepping inside that anechoic chamber. It let Cage hear his nervous system and blood circuitry for the first time. For Cage, this brought new views on sounds and composition. For me being inside my work of Tai-an, I then wanted to search for peace outwards (in addition to from within). In acknowledgement to Duchamp, I thought about tea houses that are readymade, and can be picked out from everyday shops.

Stained glass tea house ala Frank Lloyd Wright

One could seek the peace inside Tai-an, or let majestic surroundings into the tea house, e.g. fondazione giorgio cini or Versailles. In resistance to the notion of a perfect tea house, and in embracing generative nature in art, the approach I took in this work, each to their own, generated, giving it and its world, their own colors. To realise this view, I had borrow something from Frank Lloyd Wright, and his love for stained glass windows. In a generative medium, this is composed in a generative nature.

To let the full spectrum of light, life, pass and reflect through the composition, I’ve only fixed the colors and geometry of the tea house panels, while letting the blocks of the background, the outside of the tea house, essentially, colored randomly. The inconsistencies in the installation of the tea house was exaggerated to an extreme.

4'33" as a tea house

In my own understanding of 4'33", I understood it as a composition of silence, not absolute silence, but a composition of silence that lets the noise of the performance take stage, a performance of the environment. Noises and its reflections alike. So noise with directionality. In this work, for the distance traveled and every reflection, the noise decays away exponentially. The path these noise take, is more liberal, or literal.

There is no precise 3d modelling of light source. But the colored shadows of when light passes through the stained glass panel, is projected onto the outside of the tea house. In its generative nature, different color blend mode is used to let the colors through with differences. It is in keeping my composition of the stained glass tea house, each work lives through their colors.

Not unlike Cage’s invitation to his audience, to hear the noise of their environment.