Overview
A sotoroji is the garden path to a tea house. Unlike a regular path, it is a spatial device incorporating Zen spirituality to enable one to dust off the impurities of the secular world in order to enter the higher dimension of chanoyu, considered as a spiritual diversion. Chanoyu can be seen as a ceremony to separate ourselves from the everyday and enter the spiritual world, through the act of drinking tea and the setting.
The TEA-ROOM, an art collective that seeks to pursue a contemporary form of chanoyu, uses modern objects to represent the spirituality, objects and processes that form the world of chanoyu.
Capitalism is the personification of the secular world. QR codes are one of the technologies that lead us into the Internet space that occupies this. This work enables us to jack in through a QR code, then, by this space recalling something important that was driven to the edges of the capitalist space, providing a ceremony causing us to forget the affairs of secular life, making this a decentralized point by which to transform the world into a sotoroji.
Credit
– Concept: Ryuta Aoki, Souryou Matsumura
– System design and development: Ryuta Aoki
– Server-side development: Kokoro Aoki
– Lighting design: Jiro Endo(SOIHOUSE)
– Special Thanks To: Shingo Takahashi(MINIMA)、Mucha-Kucha
Related Link
Artist
Art collectiveThe TEA-ROOM
Tokyo-based art collective creating alternative tea ceremony
The TEA-ROOM is an art collective exploring tea ceremony as it could be.
Tea ceremony (cha-no-yu) is not just serving and drinking tea but one of the fine arts of Japan, consisting of gardens, architecture, paintings, calligraphy, incense, flowers, sounds, bowls, food, clothing, and rituals.
We have been translating this concept into new style through such means as using technology and adopting street culture to design new spaces, to produce experiences, and to create works of art since 2015.