Nasher Sculpture Center Announces Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony
The Nasher Sculpture Center announced its fall 2017 exhibition, Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony, will be on view from Sept. 16 – January 7, 2018.
Initially organized by the Noguchi Museum in New York, the exhibition centers on an immersive environment representing Sachs’ distinctive reworking of chanoyu, or traditional Japanese tea ceremony—including the myriad elements essential to that intensely ritualistic universe. Sachs has also produced a complete alternative material culture of Tea—from bowls and ladles, scroll paintings and vases, to a motorized tea whisk, a shot clock, and an electronic brazier. During the course of the exhibition, the Nasher will present a series of public demonstrations in which special collaborators trained by the artist will perform tea ceremony for a few guests. The walls of the tea house will be removed for the occasion, enabling visitors to watch the ceremony as it unfolds.
“Traditional tea ceremony was refined over many years, reached a mature state, was codified, and then, like most cultural phenomena that survive an originating generation, more or less stopped developing.” said Dakin Hart, Senior Curator at the Noguchi Museum where the show originated and for which it was conceived, “The fads that become full-fledged cultures are the ones that capture lasting values in universal experiences. Tea is one of those because it celebrates hospitality, reinforces the development of community through ritual, and creates a holistic but intimate sense of connection to the world in fundamental combinations of earth, air, fire, and water.”
Supplementing the tea garden are additional installations covering consummate examples of Sachs’ Tea tools, a brief history of Tea as it developed out of Sachs’ Space Program 2.0: MARS, and a selection of objects from the artist’s two decade–long career as a cultural hybridizer and devotee of modernist essentialism. The exhibition will also feature the world premiere of a new film by Tom Sachs, also titled Tea Ceremony. The film will screen regularly throughout the run of the exhibition.
