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What immediately comes to your mind when speaking of Chinese tea? Green tea, white tea, oolong tea, or any sort of unknown tea offered in a Chinese restaurant? Or maybe it paints a picture of someone savoring a sip of fragrant, steamy tea from a delicate, dainty cup? Forget them all. Today, we are talking about Cheese Tea.
Cheese Tea
Hey, Tea
Image courtesy of HEYTEA
HEYTEA (喜茶), a tea brand originated in Guangdong province shown in the video, is the inventor of the novel cheese tea. While many in China have treated the HEYTEA craze with an air of frivolity, scorning it as just another substanceless trend-chasing spectacle fabricated by its marketing stunt, the rise of HEYTEA is not accidental. This phenomenon unfolds the brand’s aestheticization through its artfully orchestrated visual narratives that play on artifice and imagination, inventing the brand as an artistic entity that evokes one’s imaginative facility.
HEYTEA as Fashion
Daniel Harris describes in his book, The Aesthetics of Consumerism, “the transformation of food into art provides a subtle way of flattering the consumer who dines on paintings and sculptures, sending masterpieces on an inglorious journey down his alimentary canal.” HEYTEA reifies this concept in a stylish product photoshoot for the pomegranate infused cheese tea. The poster is reminiscent of fashion photographs found in Vogue magazines. The female model, in a luxurious looking floral embroidered cape with velvety purple gloves, gracefully holds a cheese tea with three fingers as if carrying a chic purse. The edges of the frame cut her body and eyes off, directing the gaze to land on the purple drink with a bright white cap. By surrounding the fast-food drink with high fashion, the company elevates a cup of HEYTEA into an indispensable and versatile accessory that can accompany any haute couture to enhance the taste of the beholder. The straw without any lipstick stain indicates that the drink remains untouched. If this colorful, dashing HEYTEA exists only to finish the whole look just like a Gucci purse, will the cup ever be finished? The model raises her right hand, waving her slim fingers and calling over the next person waiting in the queue to hand over the secret elixir for becoming a fashionista.
Image: Sohu
HEYTEA as Illustration
Image: @土拨鼠, uisdc
HEYTEA creates a three-dimensional diagram to promote a green milk tea with cheese foam topping (芝芝沁兰鲜奶茶). In this advertisement, everything about the drink is suggested rather than directed, is artistically represented rather than authentically presented. The illustration dissects the drink into three layers displaying the main ingredients: the green tea sinks on the bottom, the milk floats in the middle, and the whipped cheese with the toasted pecan slices cups on the top. The actions of the tiny figures—the arrangement of the miniature garden on the frothy cheese foam with the pecan slices and the cracked opening of the pecans on the bottom by hand—suggest the involvement of artistic execution and skillful craftsmanship in the making of a cup of HEYTEA. Every single cup is uniquely composed and carefully executed, like a piece of artwork. Meanwhile, how artificial the poster seems, thanks to the illustrative style, actually makes it feel more honest. The act of displaying the drink inside out is genuine, perhaps even more genuine than showcasing the actual drink because it cannot be physically exposed like a graphic design. HEYTEA’s attitude is clear: there is nothing to hide.
Upon first glance, who would imagine this is a poster for a black grape infused tea cupped with whipped cheese (芝芝黑提)? This elusive, sensual poster has no direct reference to the physicality of the drink whatsoever. A bunch of polka-dotted purple spheres bounces on a blue-black background, crushing a cluster of metallic, artificially-looking grapes in the center. The excitement of the amplified bouncing spheres seems even to break the confinement of the picture plane, their balloon-like bodies overwhelm the spectator with a sense of uncontrolled agitation. Evocative of the dazzling disco balls spinning in a nightclub, these dizzying jumping metallic globes convey a licentious ambiance that arouses a reinless night-time revelry of wild drinking and dancing. There is no doubt about the masquerade of the actual drink in this graphic design—it’s not about how the product may look, but how it will make you feel. The poster’s visual ambiguity appeals to the viewer’s sensibilities, triggering imaginative responses. “Only my darkest lipstick shade can pair with this drink,” a female customer in a social media post reacts to the poster. It’s fascinating to witness how the poster possesses an enchantment that awakens a voluptuous, alter ego—the dark, rebellious, and restless soul murmuring underneath the surface. The actual drink then becomes the magical potion that fully triggers the transformation of a new persona upon just a small sip.
Image courtesy of HEYTEA
HEYTEA takes pride in selling profuse artificiality, playing with illusion and artifice in front of the crowd without hiding the trickery, as evident in the advertisements above. Christ Kimbell, founder and editor of Cooks Illustrated, noted, “Nobody is trying to sell you on authenticity. They are trying to sell you on a lifestyle, and are trying to create a fantasy.” HEYTEA cunningly plays up to the creativity of the beholder; selling not simply a tea drink but whatever the buyer wishes to envision and become. This notion is comparable to Roland Barthe’s argument in “The Death of the Author,” in which meaning is continuously generated and renewed by the receivers actively. Furthermore, HEYTEA’s delivery and takeout services carry out the death of the author in a more literal sense. The absence of the tea maker, the author, in this case, announces the birth of countless imaginings and reimaginings underway.
HEYTEA as Installation
Things get even more artistic in HEYTEA’s photogenic shops. These intricately designed spaces function as participatory performance installations, composing HEYTEA as a cohesive work of art. One of HEYTEA’s shops in Shenzhen drew inspiration from an ancient Chinese tradition, qu shui liu shang (曲水流觞), an elegant practice of drinking wine from a floating cup on a winding creek while singing poems enjoyed by literati. The curvilinear table that spread out the whole space mimics the streamline, and the undulating reflective ceiling resembles the rippled water. The shop's arrangement positions the eaters around the streamlined table as the literati on the river banks relishing the exquisite party; only this time, the cheese teas have substituted wines, and phones have replaced poems. Hence, in sipping the drinks inside this fluid interior space, the eaters become participants in a refined artistic rendition.
Click to see the images
@Zhe Zheng
@Zhe Zheng
@Zhe Zheng
Image: Zhe Zheng
Click to see the images
Tea plantation
Another HEYTEA shop offers a pleasant sensorial journey by transporting the diners to a tea plantation. The upward slope imitates a picturesque hilly tea garden, and the seating area arranged with green steps, couches, and faux plants is redolent with the luxuriant tea crops. Upon entering, the space conveys creativity by inviting the visitors to perform in a mise en scène tea plantation. This fabricated tea garden erases any fact-based visual traces to an actual tea plantation, such as the images of the tea crops and the tea growers. Anyone in this space can render and vivify a tea-growing and picking experience based on their own imagination without knowing any hard work and labor.
Image: Zhe Zheng
Even though the tea garden manifests artificiality, the visitors can perform and construct self-invented authenticity that relies on creativity and resides in the emotions and sensorial experiences stimulated in this tea plantation-invoking space. The white wall separating the seats and the kitchen again ensures a complete reverie without reality’s interruption. Immersed in such a tea wonderland, the visitors elicit fantasies while slurping the cheese tea, becoming an integral part of the production and creation of HEYTEA--an artistic entity. Visually enticing and psychologically tempting, these shops will soon be enlivened once the captivated visitors come into play.
Where Art Lies...
There are 480, 000 special tea shops in China in 2020, yet not a single one has surpassed HEYTEA’s popularity. HEYTEA’s aesthetic synergy--the sophisticated visual narratives constructed around its products, advertisements, and shops--highlights its value as an artistic icon and cultural symbol that signifies and expresses a shared notion of identity, especially among the younger generations in China. The rising world fame of the cheese tea is symptomatic of China’s influence in the global circulation of taste and culture. Thus, it is a critical time to reconsider how we treat the aesthetics of food and drink--the circulating imagery of and around them--in relation to semiosis and identity-forming. Under the beautiful masquerade of the HEYTEA obsession, there also lies a plethora of complications that are both meaningful and potentially frightful, owing to the danger of conflating food and identity in a popular culture of commodification and consumption.
