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The Boba Room Brings Bubble Tea To Life In New Interactive Exhibit
By
Nell Casey
Published Apr 21, 2017
Modified Apr 21, 2017
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Scott Heins/Gothamist
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By
Nell Casey
Published Apr 21, 2017
Modified Apr 21, 2017
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Many sad New Yorkers were denied entry to the Museum of Ice Cream last summer after the coveted tickets were immediately snapped up and sold out before the dang thing even opened. There's now a Museum of Chocolate in existence, but it can't match the whimsical, interactive insanity of its ice cream predecessor—which is where The Boba Room comes in.
Opening Saturday at Open Space Gallery on the Bowery is a colorful and interactive art exhibition inspired by bubble tea. Conceived of by Chaimi Food Studio co-founders Yanqiong Zeng and Iris Danlu Xing, Boba Room is an intersection of art, design and food that combines the duo's appreciation for food with their backgrounds and experiences in visual art, photography and food engineering and science.
"Both of us are very interested in the food experience and we are impressed by the Museum of Ice Cream, so we were thinking about curating a show specifically for one food so we can have more interaction and discussion about that one kind of food," Yanqiong, who goes by Yanz, told me when we first spoke about the exhibition in February. "We were thinking about food that we like and bubble tea was the first one that came to us."
(Scott Heins/Gothamist)
Yanz cites bubble tea's ubiquitousness and popularity in Asia—the two are both Chinese—where it's a common street food and something with which everyone is likely to interact on a daily basis.
"It's delicious, playful and also sexy," Yanz says of bubble tea. "When I think about sexy food, usually I think about ice cream, things like that. Most people don't know that bubble tea is also a very sexy food. Originally, the tapioca balls inside the bubble tea were smaller than they are now and a store in Taiwan that wanted to stand out so they made the bubbles bigger and used the name 'boba.' In Chinese, the word 'boba' is a combination of the words 'bubble' and 'big,' which in Chinese means 'curvy women.'"
The duo worked with artists including Natalie Jarvis, who's responsible for the neon art, and Melody Shih, who did the wall painting, to bring their vision of the bubble tea experience to life. The focal point of the exhibition will be the life-sized bubble tea with which visitors can play and interact. Balloon and fiberglass artists were also tapped to create pieces like the nine foot-tall straw and the many bubbles, the largest of which is six feet.
If you're going to view food as art, the least you can do is let visitors smell tasty eats—but Boba Room takes that one step further. Every five days a new bubble tea store will enter the space and provide visitors with their own bubble tea included in the cost of admission. There are three purveyors planned for the duration of the exhibition, including Boba Guys, Tea and Milk, and Bibi Bubble Tea.
The Boba Room will run at Open Space Gallery at 355A Bowery from April 22nd to May 6th. Admission is $10 per adult or $17 for two adults and $7 for children under 11 and adults over 65.
Tagged
boba room
bubble tea
chaimi food studio
open space gallery
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Nell Casey
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