Sept 4,5,6 | A Leaf’s Pilgrimage
A person prepares tea leaves into a ceramic tea pot with a small wooden spoon
I’m excited to jump into a new process at the High Line! Free performance, Fall in NYC, one of my favorite places?! Yes please!
High Line Art is dedicated to expanding the role of contemporary art in public spaces. We commission and produce world-class art projects on and around the High Line, sparking the dialogue that is an essential element of city life.
Dominique Fung excavates our collective inheritance of tradition, memory, and legacy, unearthing and liberating overlooked figures, misunderstood artifacts, and forgotten stories. Her work considers Orientalist fantasies, particularly as they relate to the sexualization, fetishization, and objectification of Asian women. Fung plays with this conflation between woman and thing in her paintings and sculptures, imbuing inanimate objects—artifacts, teapots, fishing rods, and food—with agency and nuance. Her canvases are portals into spectral scenes that lean into the uncanny, reversing the power dynamic of the gaze and orchestrating a confrontation between object and viewer.
For the High Line, Dominique Fung presents A Leaf’s Pilgrimage, her first live performance commission. Building on recurring motifs in her practice, the piece is a moving tableau—a poetic and, at times, absurdist journey through the life of a tea leaf. Guided by two characters, the solemn and surreal Guide and their deadpan foil, the Guide’s Assistant, the audience is led across the Diller – von Furstenberg Sundeck. Along the way, the audience is a witness to the tea’s transformation: from tender growth and harvest, to withering, oxidizing, drying, preservation, and ultimately tasting. Throughout, the audience unwittingly partakes in a voyeuristic exchange similar to those portrayed, subverted, and reclaimed by Fung in her paintings and sculptures.
Despite spanning centuries of history, technological advances, and evolving gender roles, Fung’s script reveals the immutable cultural significance and tradition inherent in the production of tea.
