Abstract: What connects a seventeenth-century European engraving of a Chinese tea plant with a Chinese-style tea house associated with American women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century? Taking these seemingly distant moments as its starting point, this talk explores the changing visual and social meanings of tea over three centuries of cross-cultural exchange. Drawing on botanical illustrations, European paintings of tea drinking, Chinese export paintings of tea production, and American political imagery, it examines how tea became more than a commodity traded around the world. It also served as a means through which Europeans came to know and imagine China, and through which social identities and forms of public life were represented. Bringing together images and practices from different historical moments, the talk asks what tea made visible, to whom, and how it helped shape knowledge, sociability, and public life.

Speaker: Jing Sun is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University and currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s CAMLab. Sun holds a PhD in Art History from Leiden University. Sun’s research focuses on art history, aesthetics, and visual culture, with particular interests in global art history, cross-cultural artistic exchanges, and the relationships between art, knowledge, and society. Sun’s work focuses especially on artistic and cultural interactions between China and Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.