Dak Haan Yum Cha (得闲饮茶) (A common greeting and invitation in Cantonese-speaking regions, representing a relaxed and carefree attitude, taking time out of a busy schedule to get together with family and friends) reimagines the ritual of tea drinking within an unexpected landscape: the beach. Borrowing visual language from home videos, travel documentation, and domestic performance, the work stages an intimate tea ceremony beneath the harsh sunlight and drifting shadows of palm trees. A luxury handbag becomes a vessel for tea utensils, transforming consumer objects into carriers of ritual, memory, and cultural displacement.

The work explores how traditions migrate and mutate through diasporic experience. Removed from the controlled architecture of the tea room, the act of preparing tea becomes improvised, theatrical, and slightly absurd. The sandy environment destabilises the precision and refinement usually associated with tea culture, yet simultaneously reveals its resilience. Tea here is no longer bound to a fixed geography or authenticity; instead, it becomes portable — a temporary performance assembled wherever the body chooses to pause.

Through close attention to gestures, textures, and spoken subtitles, the video reflects on the emotional weight carried by ordinary rituals. The repetitive actions of unpacking, pouring, and serving slow down the surrounding world, creating a fragile moment of contemplation within a transient environment. Influenced by the philosophy of ichigo-ichie (“one time, one meeting”/ 一期一会), the work embraces the fleeting nature of encounters and the impossibility of fully preserving them.

At the same time, Dak Haan Yum Cha questions ideas of value and possession. The objects presented — silver cups, porcelain, branded accessories — appear precious, yet the ritual itself remains ephemeral, disappearing as quickly as the tide. The work, therefore, situates tea not simply as a beverage but as a performative act through which intimacy, nostalgia, migration, and impermanence are continuously rehearsed.