The First Object in a Series About Becoming Light
In 2019, Baoputang began sketching out a new series under the working title 芳茶轻身换骨 — "fragrant tea, a lighter body, transformed bones," a phrase borrowed from the old Daoist idea that the right substance, taken consistently, can change what a body is made of. This small water vessel was the first piece released under that banner.
It's deliberately a dual-purpose object. On a tea table, paired with a small zisha pot or a gaiwan, it holds the spent water from a one- or two-person session — what tea drinkers call a 水方. On a writing desk, set beside an inkstone with a small ladle resting in it, the same vessel becomes a 水丞, holding the water used to grind ink. Same white Jingdezhen porcelain, same handmade process, two entirely different rooms.
Not a grand object — six and a half centimeters tall, barely wider than a fist — but the kind of small, undeclared usefulness Baoputang keeps returning to: one thing, doing two jobs, asking to be carried between a tea table and a writing desk without anyone noticing it left.