ART EXHIBITION at COURTYARD GALLERY

Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics
Tea house and zen garden installation

OPENING RECEPTION: RSVP HERE
7:00 - 8:30 PM, Thursday, June 18, 2026
 

EXHIBITION HOURS:
Thursday, June 18 - Saturday, September 19, 2026
Monday - Friday 12:00pm-6:00pm, Saturday 10:00am-3:00pm
Closed on Sundays & Holidays (June 19, July 3, 4, 20, August 11, and September 7)

What can Japanese tea ceremony teach us about ocean plastic pollution?
Quite a lot, according to the art and research collective Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics.

Founded in 2022 by a group of students and faculty at UCLA, this initiative explores sustainability and oceanic plastic pollution through the cultural practice of chanoyu (commonly called “Japanese tea ceremony” in English.) Over the past three years, the collective has cultivated relationships with artists, designers, engineers, craftspeople, scholars, and culture bearers across California, Boston, and Japan. Leading an interdisciplinary team, they built a tea house from salvaged and recycled materials and use tea-inspired performance to explore sustainability, local histories, and transnational cultural exchange on the Pacific Ocean.

Rooted in geographically oriented Japanese ceramic traditions, some artists are heirs to centuries-old techniques, now pushing those methods toward abstraction or impermanence. Others are Japanese and Japanese American mixed media artists engaging in deep dialogue with the possibilities of clay among other materials.

This summer exhibition will showcase ocean-inspired tea utensils (道具 “dōgu”) created by the collective in collaboration with various artists, an up-cycled tea room (茶室 “chashitsu”), and a small zen garden (Recycle Ryoan-ji by artist Judith Selby Lang) made entirely from shopping bags and salvaged ocean plastics! This exhibition will be accompanied by a series of public programs, including tea ceremony performances, hands-on craft workshops, film screenings, and conversations with artists and tea practitioners from LA and beyond.

We look forward to sharing tea with you soon.

Featured Artists: Hiro Chemers, Jonathan Yamakami, Nick Schick, Tyler Neufeld, Jacob Blum, Tomo Brais, Tanaka Hiroyuki (Tanaka Tatami), Yuko Ito, Judith Selby Lang, Utalay Studio (Ko Sukon) — and more.

Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics

Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics is a UCLA-based interdisciplinary research initiative that uses chanoyu (tea ceremony) as a lens to explore histories of East-West cultural exchange and contemporary ecological issues in the Pacific Ocean. In May 2024, they held a series of debut events at the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television, followed by pop-up performances at various galleries and organizations in Los Angeles. They are currently finishing design and fabrication for a prospective second installation in 2027.

PI: Michelle Liu Carriger
Curator: Aldo Schwartz

Judith Selby Lang

Judith Selby Lang explores the global impact of detritus in her multimedia artworks. Through new symbols and life-affirming images, she shapes the dialogue about personal, social, and environmental issues.

In 2007, Judith was the recipient of the Marin Arts Council New Work Fund for her project Recycle Ryoan-ji, an approximately half-sized re-creation (18'x48') of the Zen sand garden at Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto, that was presented at the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza during the Cherry Blossom Festival, 2007.

For Japan Foundation LA, she is presenting a smaller-scale example of a section of Recycle Ryoanji adjacent to the Pacific Plastics plastictea.house.

With the help of community members, hundreds of white single-use plastic bags were sewn to create the “raked sand.” With her husband, Richard Lang, she works as a collaborating partner, collecting plastic that has washed ashore onto Kehoe Beach, a remote stretch of the Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California. The Ryoanji rocks are composed of black plastic that they collected from that one beach.

Learn more at www.beachplastic.com

Michelle Liu Carriger

Michelle Liu Carriger is an associate professor and former chair of UCLA’s Department of Theater. As a longtime practitioner of the Japanese Way of Tea, Carriger both teaches and publishes scholarly research on tea as a practice of historical embodiment and cultural performance.

Aldo Schwartz

Aldo Schwartz is a writer, artist, and filmmaker based in both California and Japan. While studying film at UCLA, he founded UTeaLA—an organization devoted to the study and practice of tea ceremony. In April 2026, he will begin graduate research as a MEXT scholar at Tokyo University of the Arts.

Hiro Chemers

Hiro Chemers is an architect, designer, and M.Arch candidate in bio-integrated design at UCL Bartlett. While pursuing his BA at UCLA, Hiro served as design lead for Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics. He currently works at Carbon Based, a startup building digital tools to transform architecture and design through material-centric workflows. 

Kaoru Kuribayashi

Kaoru Kuribayashi is an interdisciplinary artist who engages with traditional forms as evolving practices. She holds master’s degrees from Goldsmiths, University of London and UCLA, where she researched how Japanese culture articulates mindfulness, ritual, and transcendence in a global context.

Related Programs

Saturday Activation Programs coming soon