Bio Art Group represents organic, non-linear time—the slow, messy, biological rhythms that negotiate with control and measurement / slip away from neat quantification.The living SCOBY and tea works embody durée (lived time) in contrast to commodified clock time.

Tea, as it circulates globally, plays a crucial role at the ecological, political, and cultural nexus. From soil and bodies to microbial communities, its interactions reveal dense ecological entanglements. Old tea shops, as key vessels of Hong Kong’s community history, have witnessed everyday neighbourhood life, migration routes, and trans-local connections; Kee Heung Chun Tea Co. is one such site where sensory memories and travelling stories gather.

The exhibition is approached as a continuously operating living network, tracing how tea, SCOBY cultures, humans, and other species intra-act to reshape matter and meaning. Here, the life of tea is not a linear cycle but a process that repeatedly unfolds—across cultivation, fermentation, circulation as commodity, ingestion, and decomposition—each phase becoming a site of transformation across species and scales.

Within these transformations, the growth and reproduction of kombucha SCOBY is read as an instance of what Jane Bennett calls ‘vibrant materiality’ (Bennett 2010): microbes, tea, and sugar form a metabolic assemblage whose fermentation makes the agency of matter palpable rather than merely instrumental. Human gestures of measuring, feeding, touching, and ingesting take part in a posthuman kin-making with these nonhuman actants, as tea and SCOBY traverse the porous interface of the skin and momentarily blur species boundaries. Even in decomposition, tea leaves and residues move into cycles of composting and regeneration, nourishing other organisms and soils, making ‘waste’ a shared condition of living-together and echoing Donna Haraway’s call to ‘stay with the trouble’ in a damaged, multispecies-entangled world (Haraway 2016).

The five works each focus on a different moment in these entangled lives: Tian Zhang’s Leaving Feeds Living treats SCOBY grown from Tibetan tea and migrant bodily data as a living ID of affective belonging; Melody Qingmei Li’s Concurrent Residue turns a family tea tray and tea dregs into a sensory memory machine; Aaron Lam Kwok Yam’s Holding Breath refigures tea trade and colonial routes through gas-driven floating forms; Gabriella Lai’s Tea Pe(s)t: Sooty centres tea ‘pests’ and their traces to question how value is assigned in economic and ecological systems; and Cheung Ching Yu Annisa’s Gathering stages SCOBY clusters as ‘living fountains’ whose collective movements model the resilience of more-than-human communities.

1/

Melody Qingmei Li

Concurrent Residue, 2026 

3D printed parts with customised filaments of tea waste, paper mulberry fiber, customised scent, single-channel video

2/

Aaron Lam Kwok Yam 

Holding Breath, 2026 

Kombucha, acrylic, stainless steel faucet, 3D printed parts, plastic membrane, barometer

3/

Tian Zhang
Leaving Feeds Living, 2026 

Physiological data-cultivated kombucha pellicle, 3D printed parts, tea, screen, electronic, video

4/

Gabriella Lai

Tea Pe(s)t: Sooty, 2026   

Sensor, humidifier, collagen casing, twigs, tea and ferrous sulfate solution, LED light

5/

Cheung Ching Yu Annisa

Gathering, 2026

Servo motor, microcontroller, silicone panel, table frame, print