Oishii Haha

Oishii Haha is a London-based studio founded by artists Wei Yen Hui (b.1988), Fine Art Graduate of Central Saint Martins; and Tom Holberton (b.1981), MArch Architecture Graduate of Bartlett School of Architecture. The studio is creating contemporary tea culture by blurring the edges of art, food and drink, hospitality and performance.

Tea is integral to Oishii Haha’s practice, and the work models the precise and repetitive rituals of the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Oishii Haha’s projects evolve from a single tea leaf into flavour artworks, teaware instruments, and installations; conceived to support live, participatory tea-tasting performances that engage all the senses. Oishii Haha embraces new technologies in developing contemporary tea culture for a hyper accelerated era, where the physical and digital are increasingly intertwined.

Works include No Brand Matcha: ‘OHH CHA BAR’ (2018), a tea bar installation exhibited at the MUJI London flagship store that explored matcha flavour and time in the city; and new pieces created from titanium and resin that utilise Machine Learning.

Pattern (2021)

NFT Collection No. 1

In the 19th century mass-produced Ukiyo-e prints arrived in Europe as disposable packaging. These woodblock prints presented an entirely new way of depicting pictorial space that left an invaluable influence on Western Art, and marked a break with traditional linear perspective representation of space.

Oishii Haha is bringing Pattern to the NFT space, a series of films that serve as digital packaging to a collection of rare teas created by Oishii Haha. The first collection of Pattern comprises of 5 films based on 5 extraordinary teas and explore their places of origin and production.

Pattern evolves the practice of origata – the tradition of folded packaging in Japanese culture; and it’s also an investigation into the material qualities of photography in the digital space. Combining Oishii Haha’s archive photographs of tea production sites across Japan with generative machine feedback loops, precarious spaces arise in the digital space through repetitive folding and kaleidoscopic distortion of pixel data. These scripted actions transform the original photographic record, but retain the memory of texture, colour and light. The propulsive rhythms of Pattern delves into the intricate details of these places that have become complex and unique patterned spaces.

The Pattern film titles and durations are tied to the specific brew times of the first infusions – where the brightest flavours and aromas are expressed for each of these teas. They are brewing instructions embedded into the digital packaging.

Each Pattern film will be limited to 10 editions of a 4K film, distributed with their NFT.

The first owners of the NFTs will be issued 100g of the original tea that the editions are based on, physically wrapped in a digital print from Pattern.

The first Pattern, Sweet Shadow in 30 Seconds will be released on Rarible.