The Story Behind Pierre Sernet’s Mobile Tea Room

New York based conceptual artist and photographer Pierre Sernet studied at the Ateliers du Carrousel of the Musée du Louvre, Paris. In his early twenties, after working in photography for several years, he relocated to the United States, where he pursued a career in business. His achievements included the creation of the first, and what was to become the largest, fine arts database in the world, Artnet.com. Since returning to his art practice, he has performed and exhibited in major galleries and museums across the world, including Palais de Tokyo, Paris and New York’s Asia Society Museum.

Over the period of several years, commencing in 2002, Sernet created a body of work entitled One. In the series, often referred to as Guerrilla Tea, the artist presents photographs in which randomly selected guests, from a variety of cultural worlds and backgrounds, are invited to share a bowl of tea. Utilising a stylised Japanese tea room in the shape of a cube, constructed from wood and metal, in which he performs traditional tea ceremonies, Sernet plays on the juxtaposition of out of context and apparently incompatible cultures or environments.

With the cube being used as a conceptual space, Sernet invites viewers to place their own set of cultural, spiritual, religious or philosophical values within it. The purpose is to have audiences question the cube’s opposition or similarities to the diverse environment in which it is placed and have viewers see each of these spaces in a new and different way, ultimately showing that these seemingly different and incompatible worlds are in fact based on similar universal values that can enable outwardly dissimilar worlds to cohabit together.

Sernet has long been a student of the formal Japanese tea ceremony at the Urasenke School in New York, and has been trained to perform the ritual in a traditional setting, where every accoutrement and each gesture is laden with complex meaning. Oscillating between busy city streets and rural idylls around the world, from a favela in Rio to New York’s bustling Times Square, to the Thar Desert in India, and a Pachinko parlour in Osaka, Sernet’s series of tea ceremonies create a powerful visual impact, offering an optimistic message of peaceful and productive coexistence.



Feature image: T086-Fu-Lai,-Xing-Ping, Guangxi, China, 2005 © Pierre Sernet