Deeper Dive: The Near-Universal Appeal of Tea with Friends

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

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Lilit Sadoyan: Hello, I’m Lilit Sadoyan, the host of OMMM, Our Museum Mindfulness Meditation podcast.  Welcome to this Deeper Dive,  where we explore the themes of our weekly episodes with experts in everything from astrology to gardening.

Michelle Liu Carriger: One thing that remains the same, and that I think this painting reminds us to do, just the way chadō does, is—this is communal. So having tea is about getting together with other people.

Sadoyan: This week, we meditated with a cup of tea inspired by the painting Still Life: Tea Set by Jean-Étienne Liotard. I spoke with Michelle Liu Carriger, a professor of theater and performance studies at UCLA, an expert on Japanese chadō, meaning way of tea, or tea ceremony. She’s currently writing a book on tea as cultural performance, among other things. Now let’s dive in.

[On video call]  Hi, Michelle, thank you so much for joining me.

Carriger: Thanks! I’m glad to be here.

Sadoyan: So the artwork that is the inspiration for this week’s episode is an 18th-century painting of a still life of a tea set that was made by an artist named Jean-Étienne Liotard. And it depicts this beautiful, exquisite tea set that is Chinese export porcelain, that was for use by Europeans. And it seems like every culture has its own traditions around tea, but that drinking tea is a kind of universal practice or even a ceremony. I know that your research focuses more on the Japanese tea ceremony, or chadō, and I’m curious to hear from you: what are some of the differences between the European style tea that is depicted or suggested in this painting and Japanese tea practice?

Carriger: Great, thanks for the question. It’s, uh, it was a lot of fun to compare this painting with what I know and what I’ve been studying in the Japanese way of tea for 27 years at this point. The first thing that really sticks out to me when I look at this Liotard painting is that this set is matched porcelain. What makes this set sort of beautiful and enjoyable to use is how every piece matches every other piece, and it has a kind of beauty in the mass of objects together. And in Japanese tea, there’s a very different aesthetic of beauty when it comes to ceramics and the objects that are assembled.

So, in Japanese tea, we have a process called Toriawase. Toriawase means literally taking and putting together. And it describes the aesthetic, uh, process of putting together unmatched items for a single usage. So every single guest in a Japanese tea gathering would have a bowl that looks different from the other bowls. So this is a major difference between what we think about and the way we put together sort of the beauty of our objects in a tea, in a Japanese tea gathering, versus this set. And I think both of them can be really beautiful, but they’re beautiful—they’re sort of appreciable in different ways.

Sadoyan: I love that idea of mismatch and juxtaposition that’s so different from this painting.

Carriger: Another thing that I’m noticing in this painting, it lavishes so much time and attention on the tactility of the objects, right? They’re shiny, they seem really thin and beautiful. So one thing that the painting does that you would also do as a guest at Japanese tea, is really think about the tactility of the object. And that’s one thing I love about doing tea. It’s, you know, it’s a quotidian everyday thing, but when you infuse a sort of aesthetic or artistic sort of appreciation into it, then it does something for you that museums can’t do, which is you get to touch everything. You get to drink out of it. You put your actual mouth [laughs] to an art object.

Sadoyan: Yes, definitely. That’s something I think that the painter’s really lavished in, you know, drawing our attention to, but also his attention to as a painter, right? That there’s this high illusionism to the painting, the way that it’s lit to really, kind of, invites you to reach in and maybe pick something up, or maybe you’ve just put something down. [laughs]

Carriger: Yeah.

Sadoyan: Yeah. Wonderful. So speaking of that kind of interest and attention to detail, I’m wondering then are there any similarities between, or shared practices between, Europe and Japan when it comes to tea?

Carriger: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one, you know, we know that tea, the actual product, the plant, originated in southwest China a long, you know, a long, long time ago, 2,000 years ago. It’s still—and it only slowly became the different forms that we see today. And one—I guess I’m gonna start with a difference before getting to a similarity—but uh, one major difference between this tea and Japanese tea is also that—this is steeped tea, right? We can actually see some of the tea remaining, and we see the teapot. And chadō uses only matcha, so the powdered leaf green tea, which, it was originated in China, but it fell out of favor in China a long time ago during the Ming dynasty, and was only preserved in Japan by practitioners of chadō. And of course, it’s not the only kind of tea in Japan. There’s lots and lots of steeped tea. Of course, the vast majority of tea consumed in Japan, like elsewhere in the world, is steeped tea, and it was really just the tea ceremony, chadō practitioners, who preserved matcha—up until the 21st century where now, of course, it’s become a kind of superfood. Uh, and, you know, we mix it with sugar and milk and make beautiful latte [laughs] matcha latte art.

Anyway, so although that’s a key difference, one thing that remains the same, and that I think this painting reminds us to do just the way chadō does, is this is communal. So having tea is about getting together with other people. And of course, you know, you can have a solitary bowl of matcha just like you can have a solitary cup of tea, and that might be nice too, you know, like with your book on a rainy day or something. But in this case, in chadō and in this moment, it seems like a small group of people got together, they slowed down, they took time out of their day, they were present with a beverage, with something to eat, and, importantly, with each other.

And if we’re lucky, they also spent time really appreciating the objects that they were with. So in chadō, we—there’s a very clear structure. This is one reason why I like to say chadō instead of tea ceremony, is tea ceremony makes it sound religious. And while some people have a spiritual sense around tea practice, it is also always just a very formal social situation. So even though some people will get kind of a Zen Buddhist sense of presence or of, you know, doing, you know, being fully present in the moment and elevating everyday life, it’s not, it’s—there is conversation. People are supposed to be having a good time with each other. There [laughs] there are more solemn and more upbeat moments over the course of an entire gathering.

And in fact, something like this painting would never happen in chadō because there is an opening where a host brings in all of the utensils, sets out all the utensils, wipes them one by one, to sort of show their appreciation, the fact that they’re taking time, that they’re doing this carefully, both for the object and for the people who are with them. There’s a middle act, if you will, where the bowls of tea are actually made, so the matcha is whisked up and given to the guests one by one. And then there’s a third act where everything is cleaned up and reset to the way it was at the beginning. And so, you couldn’t get a picture like this because actually, as part of the gathering, there would be the cleanup process, and it would look exactly the same, or almost exactly the same, as it did at the beginning. So that part’s a little different. But if we’re lucky, both the people who enjoyed this tea, Leotard’s tea and the people who were in the Japanese tea gathering, spent time appreciating each other, appreciating the things that they were consuming, but then also appreciating the things that they were with.

Sadoyan: So we’ve been talking about how this painting depicts the aftermath of a tea gathering or a tea party, and I’m wondering what suggestions you have for someone who’s wanting to bring a little bit more presence into their everyday activities, such as tea drinking.

Carriger: Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, so I’m a longtime practitioner and now a registered teacher of the Japanese way of tea, chadō. And that’s—takes a lot of time, and it’s a big, big undertaking. And I think, I, you know, I think that I personally get a lot of benefits out of it, but I think that there are easy, simple ways to make everyday life a little bit more livable, a little bit more pleasant. And so some of the things that I think are applicable both to this painting and to Japanese tea practice is first of all, finding ways to just do one thing at a time.

I mean, the thing that I love—I started studying tea as a college student in 1999 as an undergraduate student at Pepperdine University, where they had a whole bunch of classes on tea, and I think the reason why I kept doing it is because I realized after a year of the class that it was an incredible two hours of my week where I couldn’t think about anything else. I put everything else away, and I was just totally focused on the room, and the people in the room, and what I needed to do in front of me. And the way tea practice, the way chadō does that, is by having ironically so many rules and so many things to keep in mind, that you can’t possibly spend any—like, you have no brain space left over to think about anything else, to be, like, multitasking, to be sort of, you know, half on one thing and half on another thing. And so I realized that that was just a really good, useful thing that I should do for two hours a week, is not be in multiple places at once, not be worrying about my schedule and what I haven’t gotten finished.

And I think that that’s a thing that is actually easily transferable to everyday life. So maybe the people who…who had this tea, also sat down, stopped worrying about other things, were just fully present, were thinking about this delicate, delicate, you know, porcelain teacup, making sure you didn’t rattle it too hard when you put it down on the saucer, yeah, enjoying that delicious butter [laughs]. And that’s also what we do with Japanese tea, right? You take time, you hold your object carefully, you wipe it, you make sure that it is how you want it. You make the tea. You clean it all up.

And I think that it’s really this buffer on both sides of making tea. I like—I’ve thought about this a lot. I’m, you know, I’m writing a book on tea. I have to think about it, yes, a lot. I actually think it’s not so much what you’re doing in the opening, and the setting up, and the wiping, and what you’re doing in the closing. It’s the fact that you have to take time. So I think any way that we can take a couple extra breaths, take time, really concentrate on the thing in front of us, and do that with our full attention. That’s a thing I think that anyone can do.

Sadoyan: Beautiful. You know, you have me thinking about the delicacy of the objects that are depicted in this painting, and especially because the teacups shown here don’t have any handles. So I must know: what kind of teacup do you reach for, and what is your favorite tea? [laughs] What are you drinking?

Carriger: Oh, wow. All right. Well, um, obviously, I like matcha a lot; I teach how to make it. And we are big snobs when it comes to matcha. I do not drink— [laughs] I don’t drink any matcha that is sold commercially in the United States. I get it all imported from Japan. There is one that I recommend. If people are interested in matcha, I would recommend looking for Koyamaen, Marukyu Koyamaen, so it’s K-O-Y-A-M-A-E-N. That is a—that’s an Uji matcha, so it comes from the ancestral home, the most famous matcha place right outside Kyoto, and it’s very beloved by tea practitioners, but it’s also very pretty easily available in the United States. So if it’s matcha, I recommend Koyamaen.

I also love black teas, the truth is, um, and I love coffee, too. I mean, I had one teacher who loves to say there’s no tea ceremony without the coffee ceremony first, because he starts every day with coffee, and on the days that we have tea practice, he actually wakes up at 5:00 in the morning, drinks his coffee, and makes the Japanese sweets, the mochi and bean paste and, like, beautiful, beautiful sweets. And I’m definitely a coffee ceremony before the tea ceremony person as well. I think any beverage, right, could be, can really do it for you if you take your time with it and enjoy it.

Sadoyan: That’s so wonderful.

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Well, Michelle, thank you so much for sharing all of your insight around the intentionality that is brought to tea practice, and thank you for joining me today.

Carriger: Absolutely. It has been my pleasure. Thank you, Lilit.

Sadoyan: To find the related meditation and see images, transcripts, and additional resources, visit our website at Getty dot edu slash ommm. That’s O-M-M-M.