Crumpled Tea Glass

February 21, 2025

The glass

I wouldn’t call myself a full out tea-head, but I think I am definitely into tea more than an average person. I really liked going to Tea Drunk when it was open and getting, well, tea drunk. More recently I’ve been into Setsugekka in the East Village because it’s across the street from both Tokio7, where I’ve been consigning a lot of designer clothes the last couple of years, and Souen, a macrobiotic restaurant that’s dear to my heart.

The two teahouses had/have two different approaches to tea (one was Chinese and the other is Japanese), but there is weirdly a through line between them. And that through line is a super-regular I refer to as “Tea Guy”. He looks like the comic book guy from The Simpsons, except he’s in a du-rag and talks about 9/11 conspiracy theories and I guess spent time on a Marxist Vegan commune and is now anti-trans or something. But somehow he’s always there whenever I go get tea, even at like 11 am on a Tuesday or something. It’s truly something.

(Aside: I want to try Floating Mountain Tea House next. It’s a bit out of the way, but that’s a dumb excuse. Before I moved to NY I thought it was really absurd that people would say something super cool is too far away to go to, while they could easily take the subway to and from the destination. But now that I’ve lived here for a few years, I totally get it. It’s crazy how you can only understand someone after you have lived through the same exact situation.)

Anyway, as part of my ~LES Tea Journey~, I went to Tea Dealer’s and found this glass. The vibe at Tea Dealer’s is off, but I don’t want to be a hater on this blog, so I’ll skip that and get to the glass.

When I see something beautiful, or some visually new idea to me, I have to have it. I have zero impulse control, and (un?)fortunately, this glass had both qualities. But fortunately, it was also the most affordable thing in the store.

The glass was made by Yamanone Glass in Okayama. Tea Dealer’s website details, “Gaku and Junko fuse ten different materials, such as silica sand, to create strong and delicate-feeling glassware, with no two pieces alike.”

The dualistic quality in the glass is so compelling: how can you make a glass that is in a perpetual state of breaking, yet whole? I’ve never seen any glassware treated like this, and I thought the spiderweb of cracks looked so beautiful in the light.

This simple concept reminds me of the best of Margiela and his innocent art-school-like thinking, a la, “What if I made a circle into a sweater? What if I made a sweater out of socks?”, etc. I strive for this mindset whenever I create anything, because I think simple questions lead to unexpected and complicated answers.

All of Yamanone Glass’s glassware explores this idea, crinkling fragile and solid materials into cohesive forms. Their style is unique, and I think the goal of any artistic practice is idiosyncrasy. I hope to collect more of their beautiful work in the future.

You can view their works here.