ABSTRACT
Acquiring objects has been one of the core obsessions of practitioners of the ritualized, performative form of Japanese tea culture known as chanoyu (“hot water for tea”) since the sixteenth century. “Tea utensils” include imported works, utilitarian pieces appropriated into the context of the tea room, commissioned objects, and heirloom pieces passed down within families and lineages. Tea utensils play diverse and overlapping functions in tea culture, ranging from the practical (a container for fresh water) to the economic (an investment that will appreciate over time). Above all, these objects facilitate the construction of symbolic relationships between temporally, geographically, and culturally distant subjects. Early modern tea practitioners commissioned ceramics in imitation of the historical styles of pottery from China. Likewise, they collected utensils associated with famous tea men to reproduce the taste (suki) and symbolic power of bygone cultural luminaries. In many instances, tea practitioners even commissioned or made reproductions of famous objects (meibutsu) to invoke the aura and authority of previous ages. Authenticity lay not in the Enlightenment notion of “originality,” but in access to the civilized past.
