What is the function of Art? In a museum context, what can Art do for people? These are big questions which merit discussion.
‘A Ton of Tea’ by Ai Weiwei has clear links with Bristol Museum and Art Gallery’s Designated collections of Chinese glass and ceramics. It also illuminates international trade and the historic exploitation which underpin Bristol’s history as a mercantile port.
Bristol Museum and Art Gallery hold one edition of three of Ai Weiwei’s ‘Ton of Tea’. It is a one cubic metre ton of compressed and richly scented pu-erh tea. Pu-erh is considered the most precious type of tea. Harvested from wild tea bushes that often date back hundreds of years, it is typically picked and processed by hand. Like wine, its quality increases with age, making the artwork much more valuable than it initially appears to be.
Historically, tea was compressed into blocks using a tea press for easy transportation.
Aesthetically, ‘Ton of Tea’ recalls the glass and steel cubes of Minimalism. Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Richard Serra were among the artists Ai Weiwei admired. Yet, its material sets it apart from anything a Minimalist would make. The leaves and wood from tea bushes, along with the tea aroma, make this a sensory work.
So, while in this work Ai Wei Wei makes reference to post-war art history, he also focuses on globalisation and its origins.
In the West, drinking tea from Chinese porcelain was historically a status symbol. In contrast, tea was an everyday drink in China. By turning tea into Minimalist sculpture, Ai Weiwei highlights connections between past and present. He combines Western trends and Eastern ideas. This places the work at the centre of a global matrix crisscrossing the world.
To my mind, there’s more still. Taking tea bushes and compressing them in this way brings to mind how tea arrived in the West as a result of the Opium trade established by the East India Company (EIC). The EIC planted and processed opium in India for export to China. This was about grabbing a monopoly on trade to, from and between the 18th century’s largest economies, China and India. The goal was to enrich investors in the East India Company. The EIC traders did not care about the social destabilisation in China or the ecological impact on India caused by growing and processing Opium. It was all about the money.
The subsequent plantation system of tea production imported to India had devastating environmental and social impacts.
Funds invested with the EIC were in part generated by the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans run by the Royal Africa Company.
It was the tax on Tea, and especially the drive towards a monopoly on Tea exported to the American colonies, which in 1773 precipitated the American Revolution.
When viewed through the lens of history, ‘Ton of Tea’ assumes a symbolic compression of ecosystems and societies. An exploitative system compresses people’s lives and possibilities, hopes, and aspirations within a metre squared one ton cube. It’s hard edged, brutal and clinical by design, much like the systems of exploitation which birthed modern global economies.
In its creation, ‘Ton of Tea’ is a confrontation between past and present.
History is recalled as a warning.
Unchecked capitalism has a way of swallowing up and squashing ecologies, cultures and communities.
In its creation as much as in its contemplation, art makes you stop, think, and take stock. In a museum, where the lens of history is readily available, we can take a longer and more informed view. This act of contemplation contextualises our lives, drawing a connection between past and present, and planting signposts to the future.
Art makes us. And museums are the places where this act of creation takes place freely and for everyone.
Sanjit Chudha 