15th Shanghai Biennale

The 15th Shanghai Biennale: Does the flower hear the bee? features over 250 works by sixty-seven individual artists and collectives, including GRAY artist Theaster Gates at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Gates presents two interventions titled Composite Meditation, 2025, and Tea Storage, 2025. 

For this intervention in the Jiayuanhai Art Museum library featured in Does the flower hear the bee?, Theaster Gates proposed 25 categories for selecting books, in his work Tea Storage, all of which are broadly related to his ongoing interest in what he terms Afro Mingei, which aims to merge the history and cultural contributions of Black Americans with the Japanese Mingei movement’s reverence for vernacular beauty, utility, and care. Some of the subjects that informed this specific selection of 300 books are: Shinotism, Mingei, Japanese architecture of Chinese gardens, Black music in China, and Chinese tea culture.