Vessel & Measure is a book by NewChi founder and designer Heinrich Wang exploring contemporary tea culture through the language of white porcelain.

Beginning with the vessel itself, Wang asks how the objects we use for drinking can reshape our relationship with time, the body, and the way we live. As cities, work, and everyday rhythms have changed, tea vessels need not simply reproduce classical forms. New forms can invite new gestures, new rhythms, and new states of mind.

In Vessel & Measure, the vessel is where form begins. Measure extends beyond dimensions and proportion to encompass composure, attitude, discipline, and our sense of time.

At its heart, the book asks a larger question:

What kind of vessels should belong to the way we live now?

Three Ideas at the Heart of Vessel & Measure

• Objects shape behavior. The position of a handle, the weight of a teapot, or the thickness of a cup can change how we hold, pour, and drink—and in doing so, change our rhythm.

• Contemporary tea design does not abandon tradition. It carries forward the respect, restraint, and attentiveness of Eastern tea culture through forms that respond to life today.

• “Measure” ultimately refers to the person. A vessel is complete not only when its form is resolved, but when its use evokes composure, awareness, focus, and a sense of proportion within us.

1. What Is Vessel & Measure?

In one sentence:

Vessel & Measure is Heinrich Wang’s exploration of contemporary tea culture through white porcelain, examining how form, proportion, and use can reshape our relationship with the body, time, and state of mind.

We tend to think of a vessel as a container—something made to hold tea, water, coffee, or wine.

In Wang’s work, a vessel holds much more.

Raise or lower the handle of a teapot, and the position of the arm changes. Alter the opening, curve, or thickness of a cup, and the fingers find a different place to rest. Lift a vessel above the table, carve away part of its structure, or redistribute its center of gravity, and the body begins to respond differently.

The object moves from being something merely used to something that actively shapes experience.

This is where the two ideas in Vessel & Measure begin to meet.

The vessel is visible form.

Measure gradually moves beyond physical scale toward something internal: composure, warmth, attitude, discipline, and the span between tradition and the present.

Through the vessel, what we ultimately begin to measure is the way we live.

2. Why Rethink the Tea Vessel Today?

Chinese tea culture has evolved over more than a thousand years, developing a rich and sophisticated language of objects, aesthetics, and ritual.

Heinrich Wang begins with a direct question:

If life has changed, should the objects we live with remain unchanged?

We no longer inhabit the same world of secluded studies, garden courtyards, wood windows, and bamboo shadows.

Many of us now live among glass, concrete, steel, screens, compressed schedules, and overlapping boundaries between work and life. Time arrives in fragments.

The person drinking tea today may not be seated within a traditional tea room.

They may be wearing a suit in an office. They may live in a city apartment and have twenty quiet minutes in the afternoon. They may move naturally among tea, coffee, wine, and other rituals of drinking, building a personal rhythm of their own.

Vessel & Measure therefore does not reject the traditional tea setting.

It asks something more difficult:

How can what matters most in tradition continue to live in the present?

Rather than reproducing an earlier visual language, Wang looks for contemporary expressions of respect, attention, restraint, and composure.

This reflects NewChi’s broader view of culture:

Tradition remains alive not when its forms are kept unchanged, but when its spirit continues to find expression in the present.

3. Can a Vessel Really Change Our State of Mind?

One of the central ideas in Vessel & Measure is remarkably physical:

Change the object, and the gesture changes. Change the gesture, and the rhythm begins to change with it.

This is not an abstract proposition. It happens through the body.

A handle that allows the fingers to enter only from a particular direction interrupts an automatic gesture. Suddenly, the hand notices weight and balance.

An elongated handle changes the position of the arm and may even cause the back to straighten.

A vessel lifted on a raised base changes the height of the gaze and subtly rearranges the distance between person and object.

No one has instructed you to slow down.

Yet the body already has.

This is an important part of Wang’s approach to tea vessel design:

Design changes not only what we see, but how we move.

Holding, lifting, tilting, returning—the movements are familiar, almost invisible through repetition.

A different vessel makes them perceptible again.

The hand notices weight.
The eye follows the flow of water.
The ear hears tea falling into the cup.

And attention returns to the present.

The vessel changes more than the landscape of the table.

It changes the state of the person sitting before it.

4. Why Can Limitation Create Freedom?

Another distinctive idea running through Vessel & Measure is this:

Freedom does not require the absence of boundaries. Sometimes it is within a well-defined boundary that rhythm becomes possible.

We often think of limitations in design as compromises.

Yet materials have their own nature. Bodies have scale. Objects require balance, weight, and structural integrity.

Porcelain makes these questions particularly demanding.

During high-temperature firing, porcelain can shrink, soften, distort, or collapse. Open structures, suspended forms, straight lines, and geometric compositions that appear visually simple may require entirely new thinking around molds, material composition, support systems, and firing techniques.

In Wang’s work, design therefore does not simply arrive after technique has been mastered.

Instead:

Design poses a new question, and craft must find a new answer.

This changes the meaning of craft itself.

Craft is no longer only the refinement of forms that are already known. It becomes the means through which previously impossible forms can gradually become possible.

And once the object exists, the idea of limitation returns to the body.

A carefully considered angle, handle, weight, or center of gravity reduces unnecessary movement and allows attention to settle elsewhere.

Less choice can create greater focus.

Less arbitrariness can create greater ease.

This is one of the quiet propositions of Vessel & Measure:

Through limitation, we arrive at freedom.

5. Contemporary Tea Is Not a Simplified Version of Tradition

If a traditional tea setting invites us into a mature cultural rhythm, the contemporary tea setting imagined in Vessel & Measure begins with a more immediate question:

Can I settle into this moment?

The question sounds simple.

It is not.

A person arriving from a meeting, carrying the fatigue of the day or the unfinished thoughts of work, may not immediately be ready to enter a complete ceremonial structure.

Contemporary tea culture does not have to remove meaning from tea.

It can simply change the order in which we arrive at it.

The body settles first. Then tea can begin.

Here, vessels help the body find its place.

A form can reduce unnecessary movements. A handle can settle the wrist. A raised base can lift the gaze. A simplified sequence can return attention to water temperature, flow, aroma, and breath.

Respect has not disappeared.

It has shifted from an external rule toward an internal sense of proportion.

You begin to know when to pause.

When to slow down.

When to simply stay with the cup in front of you.

6. A Teacup Can Become a Place Within the City

Vessel & Measure also explores the philosophical idea of heterotopia—a “place otherwise” that exists within reality rather than outside it.

For contemporary life, such a place does not have to be a mountain retreat or a distant temple.

It may be a table.

A teapot.

A cup.

Tea is poured, the hand encounters the weight of porcelain, and time seems to enter another register.

The city outside has not stopped.

The work is still there.

Yet for several minutes, the person sitting at the table begins to hear a different rhythm.

This is why Vessel & Measure is not ultimately about escaping a busy life.

It asks how we might find composure within it.

A sense of spaciousness does not always require distance.

Sometimes, it begins with the vessel held in the hand.

7. From White Porcelain to a Way of Living

At NewChi, objects are not accessories to life.

Objects allow life to be seen again.

When we look at a teapot, we do not ask only whether it can hold tea. We look at how it rearranges the relationship between hand and vessel.

When we hold a cup, we do not ask only whether it is comfortable. We consider whether its form can awaken a gesture that has become automatic.

Since moving from glass into porcelain, Heinrich Wang has continued to ask one underlying question:

Can a material with thousands of years of history still create forms that belong unmistakably to the present?

Vessel & Measure carries that question further into the realm of living.

It does not ask us to return to the past.

Nor does it discard tradition in the name of being contemporary.

Instead, it searches for the point where the two can meet again:

where an object can retain cultural depth while carrying the body, rhythm, and spirit of life today.

8. Three Ways to Read Vessel & Measure

For those encountering Wang’s work for the first time, there are three useful ways to begin.

1. Look at the Form

Before interpreting symbolism, simply look.

Why is the handle placed there?

Why has the vessel been raised?

Where has material been removed?

Why does one line extend farther than expected?

Form is not a decorative conclusion.

It is where the thinking begins.

2. Look at the Body

Imagine picking the object up.

Where would your fingers go?

What happens to your wrist, shoulder, gaze, or posture?

Many works in Vessel & Measure are not fully understood through observation alone.

The body completes them.

3. Look for the Measure

Finally, ask:

Does this object quicken my pace or slow it down?

Does it scatter my attention or gather it?

Does it make me see only the object—or does it allow me to notice myself?

“Measure” is not an answer imposed by the designer.

It is the space the object leaves for the person using it.

Heinrich Wang and Vessel & Measure

Heinrich Wang began his career across photography, film, visual communication, and design before studying glass at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in 1987. He later became a leading figure in contemporary Chinese glass and, in 2003, turned his attention to porcelain, pursuing new possibilities for an art form deeply rooted in Chinese cultural history.

Across glass and porcelain, Wang’s inquiry has consistently extended beyond material itself.

At its core is a question:

Should every era have objects that express its own way of living?

Vessel & Measure continues this inquiry through form, craft, body, and tea culture, proposing a way of drinking that belongs to contemporary urban life.

The vessel is the beginning.

Measure is where we find ourselves within it.

An Afternoon of Aesthetics — A New Realm of Drinking

Vessel & Measure Book Presentation and Aesthetic Conversation

A pot of tea.
A vessel to read.

An afternoon in which to encounter the beauty of living.

Within the pace of the city, an invitation to rediscover composure.

Date | November 6, 2026
Time | 2:00–4:00 PM
Venue | Howard Plaza Hotel · NewChi Ren'ai Store

Private seating · Limited invitation
Please reply to reserve your place.

This afternoon is not only about an object.

It is an invitation to consider:

When the vessel changes, how might we see time—and ourselves—differently?