Assembly
Analog Studio

Prof. Mark Raymond
, Soumya Dasgupta
Feb, 2021

As part of the Analog Studio series of work, students created a series of drawings  to enhance our awareness of spatiality, architectural sensibility, and personal history. The six drawings included a one word title prompt, sequentially portrait, assembly, personal room, common room, urban, and landscape. 


Tea, with its widespread accessibility, is an essential and everyday beverage for me and many others. This common and ordinary beverage became more relevant to me as I entered my teenage years and was looking for a replacement for unhealthy sugary beverages. This was when I realised that my family members all drink tea heavily throughout the day and prompted me to adopt the practice. During my middle and high school years, I used simple tea bags for convenience, while exclusively drinking European black tea, such as Earl Grey, as an attempt to “set myself apart” from my family members’ practices of tea drinking. As I got accepted to a Canadian University and the time left for my departure from my family became clear, I started cherishing the activities my family and I shared more. Tea-drinking was one of the important social acts we all shared.

Since then, tea drinking became a highly ritualised and special experience to me. I started observing how my grandparents brewed tea, each of them different according to personal taste. While my maternal family treated tea as an on-the-go beverage, often utilising carryable filters or mugs, my paternal grandparents treated tea drinking as a ritualistic act. My paternal grandmother insisted on only drinking a specific high-mountain green tea from a Taiwanese mountain and only drank it in the “Japanese room” (an elevated room that is made out of wood with sliding doors, a common design in many older Taiwanese residential buildings as Taiwan was once colonised by the Japanese). The specialisation of tea drinking did not end with a dedicated space, a specific sequence of brewing high mountain green tea then followed:

1. Boil water
   
2. Pour boiling water into an empty teapot, warming the pot
   
3. Transfer the hot water from the warm pot to the “tea ocean” ( a vessel that would hold excess tea to prevent it from over-brewing and becoming bitter in the pot), and then to the teacups
   
4. Pour out and discard the (now) warm water into the double-layered tea tray
   
5. Put dry tea leaves into the teapot
   
6. Pour in boiling water
   
7. Wait 30 seconds, to “awaken” the tea leaves
   
8. Pour out the tea brewed by the first 30 seconds
   
9. Pour hot water into the teapot again, now brewing 60 seconds
   
10. Transfer the tea from the pot to the tea ocean
    
11. Distribute tea to the cups from the tea ocean
    
12. Repeat steps 8 to 11 for more brews, adding 30 seconds to each additional brew
    

It was in the Japanese room of her house, with this specific sequence of tea brewing, did I reconnect with my paternal grandmother, as I did not spend much time with her growing up due to my parents’ separation. Many times, she would not be the one performing this ritual, as she would be busy talking. Instead, my grandfather carried out this ritual quietly while listening to her. I adopted her way of tea-drinking as a meditative practice, as it made me feel closer to home. This was especially important when she suddenly passed during my fourth year in school and I could not leave in time to see her. The act of tea-brewing was no longer just ritualistic, but it became a healing process. 

In this assignment, I had gone through quite a few iterations. My first instinct was to catalogue the objects that make tea itself – the tea leaf. I was interested in documenting abstract forms it existed in, both in the dry state it is packaged in and in the wet state in which after it is brewed. This attempt was, however, too close to the first exercise, as the drawings and stains the tea leaves left were extremely figural. I then hoped to contextualise this ritual by capturing the space the brewing process takes place in – the Japanese room, and the tools that are used - the teapot, the tea ocean, the tea tray, and the teacup. This iteration was highly dramatic, as I sketched the elevated step of the Japanese room as a theatrical proscenium arch. However, the contradicting scales of the room and the object presented challenges in the composition, while the sketch also started becoming extremely spatial, losing focus on the object.

In my final composition, I combine two important aspects of all my iterations – the idea of cataloguing and the act of a performative process. Cataloguing the objects and steps that go into this tea-brewing ritual is indicative of my systematic thinking which comes from architectural training, while the idea of process and narrative was an important common theme among my group. The sequence of tea-brewing is drawn from the angle of the tea-brewer, often encountering the object straight from above if the brewer is performing with good posture. The drawings of each brewing sequence, drawn with actual tea, are overlaid and shifted to indicate movement and the idea of an ongoing process. Finally, the double-layered tea tray is drawn in section, to show how it catches excess tea water during the ritualistic brewing process. Water levels are drawn and annotated in the section of the tray, transforming the object into a landscape.