Critical Tea Theory: Gongfu Tea & Gongfu Uncles

About this event

From D.T. Suzuki’s teachings on Zen Buddhism to tea ceremony and Daoist breathwork practices, Bay area counterculture in the 1960s took inspiration from Eastern esoteric traditions, responding to a profound disillusionment with Western modernity and late-stage capitalism with a desire for rituals of connection and slowness. Zen, yoga, and other contemplative traditions became central to the countercultural turn. The romance of the East has often furnished the most radical dreams of Western civilization’s discontents.

Now, on the brink of a new set of spiritual and political crises, Chinese civilization is appearing in the zeitgeist as a political, cultural and epistemological foil. What’s with the proliferation of social media footage of Chinese aunties and uncles performing wild calisthenic feats in public parks? Why is anime cool now? Why is everyone in a “very Chinese time of their life”? And why is there such a renewed interest in tea ceremony?

Join interdisciplinary artist and critical theorist Kelsey Chen (Stanford) for an experimental lecture and tea service to consider Chinamaxxing as an expression of the search for alternative epistemologies and the disillusionment with failing American institutions, thinking alongside tea as a central figure in the story of the complicated role that China has been enlisted to play historically and in this contemporary moment in West...

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