Tea with Weihong

Reviewed by Fernando Castro R.

If one were to divide the tonal range between solid white and solid black evenly into 256 different shades of gray one would get a sequence graphic artists call the grayscale. In that scale zero is absolute black, one to 254 are different shades of gray, and 255 is absolute white. The grayscale is the origin of the title of artist Weihong's exhibit 255-0+Tea that lasted 36 days at Negative Space Gallery. The exhibit consisted of a tea-drinking site-specific installation that involved the whole gallery, tea-drinking performances, still photographs of people having tea woven together into a video animation, a second video of a constantly changing square and background, and a single hang-on-the-wall work. When the viewer entered Negative Space he/she faced half the gallery painted white and the other black. Half the carpet was white and half was black; and so were the table, the tea kettle, the tea cups, and even the sesame-seed snacks. The whole exhibit was conceived as an instantiation of the Yin and the Yang, the ancient Chinese cosmic forces that are at times thought to represent male and female, nothing and something, negative and positive, passive and active principles that together make the whole - what there is.

In the white room there was a video animation of a square framed by a rectangular field. The tones of the square and the field change in opposite directions a second per tone. As the field changes from black (0) to white (255), the inscribed square changes from white (255) to black (0) - the greater the arithmetical difference between square and field, the more extreme the tonal contrast. As both progress towards their meeting point at the same speed, one would expect the square to vanish into the filed for an instant at 127 gray. However, the speed of tonal change is such that an afterimage preserves the square in our perception even though it has vanished for a second on the screen. At the end of a cycle the field has become totally white, while the square has become black. Appearance and what we know to be real are at odds. The looping of the animation models the myth of eternal return and the transformation of one into the other reveals the unity of opposites. The work also reminds us of the fleeting nature of life and how memories are preserved in spite of us.

The third work of 255-0+Tea encompasses the performances of drinking tea with Weihong. Although a few guests imbued it with the artificiality frequent in the performance genre, by and large the guests made their tea-drinking experience with Weihong an authentic act. During tea Weihong would make a point of explaining Yin and Yang not as opposite but complimentary and fluid cosmic forces. The symbol of the Yin and the Yang, the T'ai Chi, is emblematic of Taoism, one of China's ancient religions. The T'ai Chi symbol eloquently shows that there is a seed of Yin in the Yang, a seed of Yang in the Yin, and a continuous evolution between the two. In the course of the conversation, Weihong would take two snapshots of the guest, which eventually found their way into the fourth work of the exhibit and the website, www.geoprobe.org/teaguests.html The fourth work was another video animation placed in the black room. It showed a succession of 127 of the 178 persons who had tea with Weihong, each one appearing twice fleetingly and then vanishing only to reappear as the video looped. The sound of running water accompanied the flow of images.

The fifth piece of Weihong's exhibit - and the only hanging one - was 255-0+Tea: 062802 - 080202. The additional numbers in the title date the lifespan of the exhibit. The work consists of a plexiglas box that was designed to mimic the T'ai Chi symbol. Half of the plexiglas is transparent and the other half is laser-printed opaque white. The transparent side looks darker because it contains the used and dried up green tea leaves of the tea-drinking performances. The numeral "255" is stamped on this side of the plexiglas as if it were the "seed" or "eye" of the T'ai Chi symbol. The opaque white side contains lighter pearl jasmine tea and its surface is stamped with the numeral "0". If tea was, in a sense, the medium of the conversation for the tea drinking performances, the hues, twists and curls of the used-up tea may indeed reflect its sounds, emotions and contents.

Weihong told me that she was born when there was a rainbow and that for that reason her father named her "Hong" (Chinese for rainbow). "So that your life will be colorful," he said. 0-255+Tea is not colorful, just black and white. But in between the absence of all colors and the presence of all colors, we live.