Homesickness: Tea as Material and Sensory Medium in Diasporic Experience

Homesickness is an arts-based research project that explores how tea mediates diasporic experience as both a material and sensory medium. Rather than communicating primarily through language, the work employs smell, touch, sound, and material presence to evoke affect through both the making process and the exhibition. Tea functions not simply as a cultural symbol of home, but as an active material that shapes perception, memory, and social relations. Over the course of a year, I produced more than 700 ceramic drinking vessels, each individually thrown and stained with black tea. Throughout this process, tea and clay were not simply materials that I manipulated; they also shaped my perception, decisions, and understanding. Making and knowing emerged together through bodily movement, material encounters, and environmental conditions. As the work evolved, I came to understand the materials less as something to be mastered than as active participants in the research process. Tea, as a cultural symbol, carries a long history in China. The installation incorporates approximately 25 kilograms of loose black tea donated by a family-owned Chinese restaurant in Toronto that closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this work, as a material, it also embodies networks of community loss, care, and diasporic memory. During the exhibition, audiences engage the installation through a multisensory encounter of seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling. Meaning emerges through embodied, affective engagement with the sound of dripping tea, warm light, and the scent of black tea. These responses, subtle or pronounced, extend beyond the exhibition, continuing to shape memory and reflection. Communication here unfolds temporally, through sensory immersion rather than representational closure. By foregrounding material mediation and drawing on Daoist understandings of materiality, Homesickness contributes to multimodal media research from a non-anthropocentric perspective. It challenges the primacy of language-based approaches to communication and demonstrates how artistic practice can function as a material form of communication and knowledge production. This project proposes arts-based and multimodal practice as a rigorous form of media and communication research, one that works through affect, sensory experience, and material engagement, which cannot be fully translated into words, but needs to be encountered, inhabited, and experienced through the body.