Sen-no Rikyu saw tea ceremony as a means of denying contextual norms, stripping down layers of pretext to rediscover beauty in the otherwise ordinary and obvious. In the tea house the simplest, most everyday of objects and actions became something foreign and new, saturated with reverence and re-situated with new identity.
While today, in both Japan and abroad, the traditional teahouse has become an exotic artifact, its construction and materials costly and rare, in what ways might we reapply the original philosophy of the teahouse to our own contemporary lifestyle? Even within the setting of an ordinary room how might we use the found and the mundane as the teahouse once did to be transported out of the everyday and reinvent our own identities.
Tamotsu Ito & Andrew Nahmias