Gülşen Çalik

I remember drinking lots of tea. I left the used tea bags around the room. The bags dried; the leaves left cryptic imagery on the surface: dogs, aliens, firemen, divers, buildings, machinery, and oddly, people I thought I had noticed in the subway. It was as if the dried up bag would come alive with a face, or a tree, or two trees, then a forest... I enhanced the images with colored inks and watercolors. It became a bad habit. I started keeping a visual diary of sorts although that is probably an exaggeration. I would some days "paint" these images for half a day, and this would go on for a week, and some times I could only paint three or four tea bags. I have around 1,700 tea bags. At Tribes Gallery on the Lower East Side, I pinned over 1,400 bags onto the walls. The gallery smelled like a bottle of exotic drink. Chai, which is the word for tea in Asia, became the title for the series. Out of a need for phrasing, I called the series, "Voyage to Chai."

click on the first image to view the exhibit in sequence. click on the navigation within the exhibit to move backward or forward within the work, or to return to this page. click on one of the arrows to return to the the beginning of the section or to the home page.