Brew .Up .Tea - 100 Reasons for Drinking Tea
What are 100 Reasons for Drinking Tea? !
"Shennong ever suffered 72 poisons in trying herb medicines and tea is the detoxifcation for him."
The earliest record of tea can be traced back to Chinese ancestor of Shennong. The fashion of drinking tea, originating from Tang Dynasty and flourishing in Song Dynasty ,quickly spread to Europe in Qing Dynasty ,which shows the histroy of tea culture is long and profound.
Tea culture forms a unique epoch style under the cross influence of customs and habits, socio-economic, and consumption patterns. By inheriting traditional Chinese culture with a long history , Taiwan's hundreds-year-long tea culture shows diverse richness along with the changes of the times and social progress. In the 1950s and 1960s , tea and tea-things are the imported and exported products in the largest sales volumes in Taiwan, and modern lifestyle also forms the phenomenon of consumption that Chinese tea is compatible with exotic tea.
When consumers begin to place emphasis on symbolic meaning of goods besides practical function, we have inevitably come to the consumption age. Besides the physiological action to promote the production of body fluid to quench thirst, modern tea culture can also meet consumers' diverse needs at personal level of consumption desire and impulse . When Taiwan's consumers buy tea, they desire certain taste, value, class, and social status symbol, not just tea itself.You could say that to buy tea is just to purchase a "symbol" of tea, and the standard of "good" tea is probably irrelevant. What is the need to drink tea ? What is the standard of good tea?
The exhibition of "Brew .Up .Tea"attempts to explore the consumption character of tea culture,which allows the spectators not only to review the multi-sub-culture standard from the changes and extension of the traditional "good" tea ,but also to understand the psychological shaping history of tea consumption and a variety of consumer practices. Meanwhile,this exhibition shows the contemporary Taiwanese tea culture and the industrial development potential through a contrast between historical heritage and taste exploitation.

"Brew .Up .Tea"Coming Back in 2009
In 2007, the exhibition of "Brew .Up .Tea" was planned to be the first example of industry-university collaboration for practice exhibition of the Arts Department of Tunghai University . For Taiwan Craft Research Institute commissioned for production of this exhibition , it was also a special experiment regarding technical education .
Over the past more than two years, all kinds of tea cultures are still ongoing in Taiwan. The exhibition of "Brew .Up .Tea" strides over the time and space for off-site reproduction in Beijing Songzhuang Art Festival in 2009 , sharing the unique Taiwan's tea culture with the vast spectators. How to interpret the consumption character of different societies , we are looking forward to the spectators' response derived from this exhibition. (Chen Xianglin)

Strangers When We Meet
The exhibition of " Strangers When We Meet" attempts to list the artists' manners to disseminate and manipulate images in response to the capitalist society overwhelmed by multimedia and visual images . These " diversion " artworks do not show reproduction without thinking or tend to encourage reproduction, which are just post-modernist artistic phenomena to show a face of art latent in contemporary living habits.
The exhibition is to reflect such times' atmosphere and artistic trends. These artists draw their materials from the images or objects familiar to the spectators as a catalyst or a medium in artistic creation to generate a variety of creative ideas. Some of them rely on copying or using copies to dismantle or convert the understanding of the original artworks, or integrate the values and attitudes of contemporary life into historical classics and elements of artworks, in order to convey the times' message or overturn aesthetic values through such a process of translation and re-interpretation.The others of them even directly convert or criticize the so-called identity of artist, and after a qualitative change in the role and the diversion of identity, the artworks produced have become another way of dialogue, an interesting communication and imagination.
Among them, some people try to resist the arts or social and cultural mechanisms, some people are unwilling to become conditioned by the historical reality, relying on the way of mocking art history for re-interpretation of art history to provide an alternative imagination. Whether the artists' intentions lie in a creation of personal myth , a recognition or absurd thinking of art history , an imitation beyond space and time , or a fantasy unrelated to aesthetic depth , these artworks reveal that the artists are keen to break the pre-existing authority or value system.They lock the critical and mainstream symbols and vocabulary in historical images or popular culture texts, to subvert the concept of pre-existing text, or swap the established contextual relationship so that the "diversion" or "stopgap" become an effective strategy for the contemporary artistic creation and cultural criticism.
It is hoped that through appreciation and reading the spectators could feel the creators' black humor in deliberately misappropriated, restructuring, and copying, and experience significant change in the old and new symbols in the show field . And these artworks also remind the spectators to think that this symbol extraction is a universal phenomenon of modern society, and people often practice the same behavior in their daily lives , which even becomes a habit. We are constantly re-interpreting the symbols received from our lives, giving these symbols their own significance based on our own understanding. The re-organizing of this exhibition in 2009 gives us the opportunity to share the similar issues in this era of ours . (Chen Yuanzhen)