Fan painting, tea culture and shared artistic dialogue across communities and traditions
Developed through public programmes held at the Ashmolean Museum, Breeze & Brew is a community-curated fan exhibition initiated by Weave Yard in collaboration with researchers from the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology.
Bringing together contemporary fan artists, community participants, museum collections and tea culture, the exhibition explores the folding fan as both an artistic medium and a cultural space shaped by memory, imagination and shared experience.
Inspired by gallery visits, object handling sessions and conversations around tea, participants created painted fans responding to themes of landscape, gathering, stillness, cultural reflection and cross-cultural dialogue. Presented alongside works by contemporary artists, these painted fans create conversations between professional artistic practice, personal storytelling and community creativity.
At the heart of Breeze & Brew is a belief that museums, objects and artistic traditions can become spaces not only for observation, but also for participation, dialogue and shared cultural experience. Rather than presenting the folding fan as a distant historical object, the exhibition invites audiences to encounter fan painting as a living artistic and cultural practice connected to contemporary community life.
Many of the works in this exhibition were created by participants painting on fans for the first time. Together with works by established artists, they reflect moments of encounter across different generations, backgrounds and cultural traditions through the shared language of fan painting.
Dr Jenny Wang
Founder & Director, Weave Yard
“For me, this fan is not simply a landscape painting, but an expression of longing, blessing, and the precious moments of togetherness that I always treasure.”
— Gao Yan, Exhibition Participant
Rather than approaching the fan as a decorative object alone, Breeze & Brew explores fan painting as a space for storytelling, contemplation, cultural reflection and artistic experimentation.