TRAINING: When Herbs Come Together, How Bitter Can We Go?

Language: Mainly English, Dutch or Cantonese when it comes to the name for the Herbal tea
Location: third-floor exhibition space

Have you been getting pimples and sore throats? It might be because you’ve been eating a lot of yeet hay foods—anything that is fried, greasy, or spicy. What you may need is a nice ceramic bowl with “cooling tea” (Chinese herbal teas; Leung cha in Cantonese) - an intangible cultural heritage that is still popular in Hong Kong to minimise the body’s excessive heat and dampness.

Here, we bring three popular herbal teas for you to test, touch, sense, and understand their effects. Grabbing a tea in our hand awakens collective nostalgia and childhood memories about the daunting Hong Kong drink. The artists Jessie Tam and Zheng Tianyi felt the need to preserve these practices when they came to work in a culture where it was missing. Growing up in a complex society filled with tensions and anxiety, they borrow the power of herbal tea to learn to take good care of themselves and to use it as fuel for both grieving and healing.