When an Australian Chef, famed for his western fusion restaurants, ventures into the Chinese market and opens a Shanghainese Restaurant with a tea emphasis, that targets the ever discerning local community- what would be a suitable design language to accompany such a venture?

Departing from the conventional Chinese restaurant language, our studio invented a new range of elements centred round tea that acted as a series of abstracted 'art pieces' with a traditional DNA: tradition modified!

A tea poem was compressed in 4 directions so the individual characters became ineligible, and the poem blurred, to form room divisions, window screens etc. The same poem was then projected onto the body of a naked women, so the incomplete characters folded around her body, making once more the poem non-understandable. The resulting women and graphic literally lying up the stairs.

Finally, the content of the poem was encapsulated within glass as a series of tea panels- tea without characters, that acts as a backdrop to the craft of the Tea Master.

completed winter 2011