Something special is brewing at the Seaport. To ring in the Lunar New Year, Water Street Projects hosted CHA CHA, free public festival open every weekend in February celebrating tea culture, design, and tradition. Conceived by WSA’s Professor in Residence Karen Wong, the New Museum’s chief brand officer behind groundbreaking initiatives including IdeasCity and NEW INC, CHA CHA was named after the Asian diasporic term for tea and martial artist Bruce Lee’s favorite dance. This immersive experience spanned more than 40,000 feet of gallery space, including five original “tea houses” inspired by culturally-significant Asian teas, a Traditional Chinese Medicine Apothecary, and a pop-up restaurant. More than merely an architectural installation, CHA CHA provided an open platform for dynamic programming, bringing together New Yorkers of all generations and backgrounds to savor and learn about this humble yet ubiquitous beverage. Midway through the run, Care of Chan caught up with curatorial assistant Ming Chen and contributing artist Shannon Lai to learn more about their process and the thriving communi-tea they cultivated.

Jake Stavis: Can you both share some background on your role in the project?

Ming Chen: I've been with the festival since it first started. My main role was curating the twenty culinary vendors, but I also assisted wherever assistance was needed, especially with the TCM installation, as well as with public programming.

Shannon Lai: I was approached by Karen [Wong] and Ming to design one of the tea house activations for lotus tea. I concepted a house in collaboration with Studio Lily Kwong that at its core is about plant life. I use plants as a medium for my art practice, but my background is actually in farming. I've worked in the food world and I have experience producing events, so I was eager to work on programming for the festival.

JS: Ming, you and Karen commissioned five artists and designers to reimagine a tea house inspired by five culturally significant teas - oolong, hojicha, pu erh, lotus, and chai. I love that this festival really thinks about tea as something that's at once both culturally specific, but also very much cross-cultural and familiar to a variety of people. I like that this has taken a different sort of organizational framework than say national identity. I'm curious, how did you settle on these five types of tea?

MC: We wanted to make sure the teas represented a lot of different geographies across the Asian continent, but also we wanted to choose teas that offered aesthetic inspiration. Oolong tea for example - wu long means black dragon in Chinese and it has this unique twisting shape. The artists, Aaron Santiago and Michaela Ternasky-Holland, incorporated this twisting motion into their XR video. Another example is hojicha, a roasted tea - this method of production really stemmed from a concern with sustainability. Toshiko Mori and Tei Carpenter are a mother daughter architect duo who made the tea house inspired by hojicha, and they are very interested in incorporating sustainability into their practice.

JS: How did you match the teas to the artists? Shannon, did you choose lotus tea?

MC: It was kind of a back and forth. Even though we sort of assigned the teas to each artist, there was room to negotiate within that assignment.

SL: Lotus grows in a really specific ecology - the flowers typically grow in mud in ponds. Given my plant-based approach to design, it was an interesting ecology to explore and it’s definitely expressed in the teahouse we created.

MC: And lotus tea is the only floral tea in the bunch.

JS: Are the others all derived from Camellia sinensis?

MC: Technically lotus tea is an herbal tea, but it can be blended with Camellia sinensis. Typically when it's only herbs that's reserved for medicinal purposes.

JS: Shannon, can you share more about this ecology of the lotus?

SL: So how they are grown is kind of rooted in my personal interpretation of a tea ceremony. Instead of exchanging tea, the primary action is planting a seed - this knowledge share of planting a seed is something which has been a part of my art practice for decades. At its core this piece is a reflective platform that is a metaphor for the lotus pond. It's an interactive piece where people are invited to plant their own seeds - we've chosen nasturtium to represent the lotus. We have instructions set up at these self-guided work benches where participants are encouraged to meditate on a hope or a dream as they're moving through this ceremonial exchange. They plant their seed, they water it, and then they're invited to place it on this platform that represents our collective pond. It will grow over the next few weeks as long as the festival runs and then they're invited to come back on the last day to pick up their seedlings. During the festival we're cultivating and nurturing them, setting up grow lights, and watering them every day. So that was my interpretation of a tea ceremony within a tea house inspired by lotus. It doesn't really have a lot to do with the biology of the lotus plant, but I guess it's more of a metaphorical approach.

JS: I love how you position the tea house as a relational entity, a place for knowledge sharing. Ming, I'm curious if you provided the artists with a definition of a “tea house.”

MC: We didn't really provide any strict guidelines or rules about what a tea house could be. We provided a mood board of images of various interpretations of structures, incorporating elements like light, plants, inflatables to encourage these immersive installations, but we were very open to whatever the artists interpreted and encouraged them to play to their strengths. One of the tea houses is like a fountain - that's made by Chen Chen and Kai Williams, who specialize in object making. There's also the XR (extended reality) tea house, which is a room where artificial intelligence can read your tea leaves. Similar to Shannon’s interpretation with the lotus tea, I think that focuses more on the rituals associated with tea than a built structure.

JS: When we talk about the rituals - maybe reading tea leaves more so than planting a seed - makes me think about the inherently social nature of tea. It's very much a drink to be shared - the act of pouring tea for someone else, or even this idea of putting on a pot of tea when someone comes over. How were you thinking about the social component and making connections?

MC: It just came out so naturally with what everyone made, we didn't need to be explicit about it. Like Tei and Toshiko, they made their tea house inspired by nodate, a Japanese kind of tea picnic that is inherently social. And based on the past few weeks it seems like people are using the space to meet friends and try new experiences. It’s really cool to see how the architecture is encouraging these interactions.

JS: There are a lot of comparisons to be drawn between tea and wine as two agricultural products and social beverages, but I think there's probably a more egalitarian component to tea as compared to wine. I love that the programming is almost all free. What has been most exciting for you to see come to fruition?

MC: The vendors are interacting with people in a way that doesn't normally happen in a typical store setting where people come buy something and then leave. The festival has become a platform for vendors to engage with people more deeply, to talk about how they got into what they're making and also the cultural history behind it.

SL: You were asking about this feeling of the collective or social, and that really thrives in the programming. I’ll give you an example of some really successful back-to-back programming last week. First we worked with this visual artist Shawna X to host a kid-friendly lantern making workshop in celebration of the Lantern Festival. They were crafting with pipe cleaners and it was just so vivacious with a bunch of happy kids running around. And then we were able to turn the space over for a Vietnamese traditional herbal steaming workshop led by Phoebe Tran. She has a long-standing practice cooking Vietnamese diasporic food through her project Bé Bếp, but she’s also a farmer and a traditional medicine practitioner. And together we completely transformed the space into this super calm, herbal steaming bath space. I feel like that really encapsulates the energy of Cha Cha Festival - it's about finding solitude but it's also about finding solitude within the collective. It is about moments of pause but also moments of fun and chaos. We’ve hosted mahjong every Saturday. We have a Vietnamese tea workshop by Anna Ye Tea - that’s a more in depth tasting and workshop on the ritualistic practices of lotus tea. We have a couple more arts-based workshops - painting with tea as natural dyes with Cara Marie Piazza, and then clay teacup building with Anna Rottner of The Other Almanac. We’re just cultivating and curating a community of creative, excited, passionate people across disciplines.

JS: I love the breadth - it gives you an opportunity to meet people at various levels of interest and knowledge about the product. Is everyone local to New York? How did you go about that process of curation of the vendors?

MC: It was honestly fairly informal - Instagram was a really major source.

JS: I mean, it's a major way that people are connecting over these more cottage-run food projects these days. Is everyone every weekend or is it kind of like people come at different times?

MC: I think the energy that Shannon highlighted in the festival is also apparent in the structure. So, it's pretty like, come as you want, come as you are. It's very open.

JS: I was just reading through the press release and there was the Far East Trade Center reference. I mean this in the least Orientalist way but there's almost an Alice in Wonderland component of all these people are here for this dynamic programming thing and then they're gone the next day.

MC: Totally - that’s very much the energy at WSA too.

JS: I want to talk a bit about the TCM installation you created with Kamwo, how did that component arise?

MC: Coco Tin who's an architectural designer and brand strategist at 2x4, she was the one who pitched the apothecary installation. She does a lot of research about sanatoriums and the architectures of healing and medicine. I assisted with project coordination and research. Kamwo is the oldest and largest herb shop in Chinatown, so they seemed like an obvious partner and also they have the infrastructure for events and programming that a lot of these herb shops who are small mom and pop shops don’t really have.

JS: There's an interesting sort of tension again between sort of retail, apothecary, and art installation, which is not unique in the art world. We can find countless examples of similar blurring of boundaries across the history of art, but I don't know if I have any direct parallels specifically integrating TCM.

MC: Initially we wanted to sell herbs from the installation because we thought that that would be the most obvious way to provide a platform for Kamwo but we really wanted something interactive. So instead they're offering complimentary ear seeding, a Chinese form of acupressure. It was really cool to see kids and adults smell these herbs and become interested through their senses. Most people don't like to sit and read, but they want something engaging.

JS: I'm curious if you guys have taken any sort of learnings away from this experience and how you might incorporate tea into your own personal social or entertaining practices. Are you bringing any of this into your own life?

SL: I find myself honoring ritualistic practice more, and thinking more about ritual whether that is through a tea ceremony or some other daily ritual and the power that holds. More practically, a big takeaway is that our community wants this space and these types of activations. In a way tea is bridging and bringing people together, but it's also just creating a third place like this - we are just needing this now.

MC: I definitely second Shannon on the third place thing. Removing the ceremonial aspects of tea and thinking more about the social element of simply inviting your friend over for a cup. And the power of sensory programming - it's very engaging.