New Haven Independent

The Yale University Art Gallery is serving up Tea Culture of Japan: Chanoyu Past and Present, a survey of 1,000 years of spoons, scoops, kettles, bowls, and scrolls. Like the brew itself, it is a quiet yet bracing tour of the evolution and meaning of tea service in Japanese culture.

The exhibition, curated by Sadako Ohki, runs through April 26 on the first floor of the gallery. Chanoyu, which Ohki says literally means “hot water for tea,” presents a wonderful contrast with Picasso and the Allure of Language, an exhibition that is not a companion but a neighbor; it also opened this week on the gallery’s fourth floor.

It might be a tonic for the visitor to view them together.

Whereas the Picasso celebrates the rampaging individuality of one of the world’s greatest artists, Tea Culture is the Zen antidote. After a nod to the ostentatious appropriation, by the noble and warrior classes, of tea ceremonies and artifacts, illustrated by of sumptuous floral screens, most of the exhibition focuses on the spiritualization, or wabi approach, to tea that evolved in the hands of the Buddhist monks beginning in the 16th century.

The ceremony in the hands of the monks was simplified. Implements are made not of rare materials, but of bamboo, and the point of the service is to slow down all stages of preparation and consumption in order to enhance awareness of the senses.

So valued was the tea ceremony as a kind of adjunct of the Zen life, that Tea Masters emerged, much as Zen masters. Featured in the exhibition is a 16th century tea master, Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591). His and other tea masters’ implements were even named. This one is inscribed “Hyakusai” which means one hundred years old.

But is that an expression of reverence or a kind of personal graffito? Does “100 years old” refer to the scoop or its owner? The Zen answer would, of course, be: And what is the difference between the scoop and its owner?

No matter. The exhibition, which Ohki said is extraordinarily rare in bringing together so many prized items, which were often carefully guarded by their owners, has representative objects from Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Holland, and, of course, China; tea, like much else Japanese, was brought from China in the 9th century.

In addition to the recreation of a sedate, tiny tea house, a highlight of the exhibition, which in many ways, seeks to have none, is the last section, Chanoyu in the 21st century. In a representative effort of the apparently many Asian artists seeking to make the tradition relevant, Korean artist Lee Lee-Nam has created a single channel video inspired by an 18th century ink painting by Kim Hong-do.

After walking through the exhibition, one pauses here and observes, for its three minutes of running time, how snow gently falls from the video sky and gathers on a clump of bamboo. Slowly the snow increases in different formations on the leaf; the stem bends under the weight, gentle yet irresistible, and then the snow falls. And that’s it.

Given the serene and beautiful immobility of the other objects in Tea Culture of Japan, the drop of the snow is positively dramatic.