The Poetics of Tea

Thursday, February 27, 2025
7:00 PM - 9:30 PM

In an effort to explore alternative epistemologies of knowledge rooted in taste and smell, this gathering asked participants to attend to the somatic experience of imbibing tea in/with community. Three steepings of tea were interspersed with writing exercises that direct attention toward the sensorium and provided space to grapple with the difficulty of description. Inspired by Koo Jeong A's Odorama Cities for the Korean Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, participants drew upon personal scent and taste memories with writing prompts that mediated olfactory and gustatory experience through other sensory modalities, such as time, texture, and landscape. Following the framework of an intimacy gradient—an architectural concept that arranges spaces within a building in a sequence of increasing privacy—the writing practices invited greater vulnerability and depth of thought with each additional steeping, culminating in a group writing exercise and reading.

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Cammie Lee is a NY-based writer and tea sommelier from Portland, Oregon interested in exploring alternative theories of perception through forms of wisdom rooted in the body. Occasionally, she also publishes her writing on Seoul Calling, a blog she began while teaching in Korea that examines what it means to be Asian, Korean, and female.