Geicha x Ukicha

May 11–12, 2025
🏡 Bridge Studio, Kyoto

October 1, 2025
🏡 Oboro, as part of Nuit Blanche Kyoto

Geicha 藝茶 

Geicha (藝茶, literally “the art of tea” or “aesthetic tea”) is an artistic research initiated by Thomas Vauthier that explores tea as a poetic, curative, and para-curatorial gesture. Extending the path of sadō (茶道), this practice shifts the act of drinking tea towards a relational and sensorial threshold, where attention to the moment, to subtle details, and to the quality of leaves and water becomes a collective experience of care.

Inspired by the history of sencha circles and the practices of the bunjin (literati) in Japan, 藝茶 situates itself within a paradoxical tradition: originally informal and convivial, nourished by Chinese influences (poetry, calligraphy, painting, antiquities), it gradually became ritualized and codified. In contrast, 藝茶 seeks to recover the spirit of openness and freedom that animated those gatherings: tea as an occasion for aesthetic sharing and a dialogue between art and daily life.

The practice unfolds in multiple forms: performative encounters, sensorial installations where tea is accompanied by objects traditionally associated with it (kakemono, ikebana, scenographic devices, and collections of chadōgu reinterpreted as curatorial objects), as well as contemporary artworks. Each ceremony becomes both an intimate space of tasting and an exhibition device linking bodies, knowledges, and artworks.

Finally, 藝茶 embraces an ecological and medicinal dimension: emphasizing the quality of water, the aging of leaves, and preparation methods—not only shaping taste but also the beneficial effects of tea on body and mind. The ceremony is thus not only aesthetic but also a practice of care, a way of inhabiting the ecology of the everyday.

Through 藝茶, Thomas Vauthier proposes tea as a curatorial medium: an art of connection, attention, and impermanence, engaging both senses and thought, recomposing ephemeral communities around the simple yet profound gesture of “drinking together.”

The first episode of the 藝茶 (Geicha / Art Tea) cycle was held at Bridge Studio, featuring the drifting tea practice of artist-curator Midorikawa Yutaro, Ukicha, invited to Kyoto for the first time. Together, they blended tea, scents, memories, and fragments of past projects: a tasting of Taiwanese oolong using smelling cups; a reflection on renewing tea rituals in the contemporary world; and a “perfume tasting” in soba choko, drawn from the Museum of Contemporary Art Fukushima and collective rituals such as Scents of Community. Echoes of earlier works—Monomi or the spectral creatures of Metapets—also surfaced, weaving an atmosphere of subtle gestures, textures, and shared silences.