Tea Base is a Friend of Chinatown curators jes sachse and Hannia Cheng. Photo: Jae Ng. — *Tea Base is a Friend of Chinatown* curators jes sachse and Hannia Cheng. Photo: Jae Ng.

Perching over a table loaded with sushi, Christie Carrière, Hannia Cheng, and jes sachse are mulling over the year they and fellow volunteers have just spent turning the space recently vacated by 20-year-old Vietnamese ice cream shop Xuân Hu’o’ng into a bustling arts space and community hub. Located in the sleepy recesses of Chinatown Centre’s basement — a space increasingly barren as shops close up while properties in its namesake neighbourhood are scooped up by developers — in its first year of existence, Tea Base has emerged as a defiant space holder for members of Toronto’s Pan-Asian diaspora and an incubator for community activism, all while hawking tea curated by local sommeliers.

“We’re kind of a tea space, we’re kind of a rental space, we’re kind of an office that we just come and work out of, we’re kind of a mahjong hall, we’re kind of a garden club,” Cheng explains. Having co-founded the space alongside Michael Vu and John Smith in January 2019, she’s recognized as the group’s de facto leader, and over the past year she’s overseen the space as it’s hosted more than 140 events.

Yet Cheng is reticent to identify the space as a business, more comfortable referring to it as a living room — a preference that makes sense after hanging around for any extended length. Meeting with the group on a rare day off, there are still members popping in to hop on the WIFI and get some work done on laptops as we chat milestones and challenges. As much a tapestry of the centre’s history as a raison d’être, murals and protest signs bearing slogans like “Community Not Condos,” “Green Jobs For All,” and “Chinatown Is Not For Sale” call out from shelves and corners, but a lot of the space’s programming emphasizes recreation and communal expression: self care workshops; Tea Base and Chill, a series encompassing everything from karaoke and Super Smash Bros. to movie screenings and hot pot-style pot-lucks; Mahjong Mondays; Taro Tarot Tuesdays; Bitch ‘n’ Stitch Sundays.

As part of the group’s month-long anniversary celebrations, Cheng and sachse have curated a week-long gallery exhibition on the second floor of the Gladstone Hotel, a multi-disciplinary show titled Tea Base is a Friend of Chinatown, a reference to the blurred lines between Tea Base and Friends of Chinatown Toronto (FOCT), an ad-hoc anti-displacement advocacy collective that crystallized out of Tea Base surrounding a recent development proposal threatening neighbourhood dim sum spot Rol San and 12 other Chinatown businesses at 323 Spadina Avenue.

When the city erected an all-English sign announcing the development proposal, in November, FOCT responded by installing a parody sign that posed critical questions about the implications of the development while also drawing attention to the city’s inaccessible failure to acknowledge the demographic of the neighbourhood, articulating its message in English as well as traditional Chinese characters, later addressing City Hall directly through a deputation at a Subcommittee for Affordable Housing meeting.

Friends of Chinatown Toronto (FOCT)’s parody development sign. Photo: Jae Ng.

Provoking media attention from BlogTO and CBC, in December, FOCT’s actions prompted the city to install a new official sign in all-Chinese characters, but Carrière worries “that’s kind of as far as they’re gonna go with it.”

Tripping over to Queen West, the Gladstone exhibition places Tea Base and FOCT’s politics front and centre in a neighbourhood that knows gentrification all too well, perhaps most explicitly framed by a series of macrame-supported diptychs featuring Cheng and her mother Jade in dialogue with each other about their relationships with Chinatown.

“We had a bakery spot, a bubble tea spot, a dim sum spot (which was always changing because my mom was spiteful of raised prices), there was also a Hong Kong bistro spot, a regular dinner spot, a fancy dinner spot… we had it all!”

It’s a eulogy for the neighbourhood’s changing landscape, both for the businesses that have been displaced and the ones that remain but only as shadows of their former selves.

“They’re still there, and we still go to them, but I don’t go to them every week, and it’s not the only place that I go to once a week. But some of them aren’t there,” Cheng explains. Her words hang in the air with the nostalgic care of her mother’s macrame, and a general theme of suspension pervades the works on display at the Gladstone, as if at once registering the upending threat encroaching on Chinatown while documenting the local community’s resilience, like an anti-gentrification snapshot: Arezu Salamzadeh’s oversized, ceiling-strung, gold-flaked fishing lines simultaneously functioning like visual puns on the lure of capitalism and evoking downtown’s omnipresent cranes while FOCT’s parody sign decorates a wall opposite a screen displaying memes imploring viewers to “BUILD DIM SUM TOWERS / NOT CONDO TOWERS”; nearby, Salamzadeh has also installed a candy machine dispensing ceramic fortune cookies at two dollars a piece (toonies only) — beautifully absurdist fetish objects that charge vending machine prices for entirely inedible representations of widely complimentary dessert food.

“I really appreciated in this group show just how many different modalities are being evoked and how there’s just so many tethers,” sachse comments.

At the opening for the gallery, sachse has installed a pair of works dealing directly with the intersecting subjects of displacement, poverty, and disability, also invoking the Anti-Displacement Garden Tea Base planted outside Chinatown Centre back in June.

In one piece, a plaque that reads “not all who loiter are a threat” is fixed to a plastic chair on the landing between the building’s first and second floors, while another in the elevator greets users with a friendly “it’s nice to see you,” tomatoes hanging from above tethered with ribbon from the garden’s ribbon cutting ceremony.

“I like taking plaques and something that’s coded as the institution or the building or something that’s architecturally non-feeling and creating feeling in those spaces,” sachse says. These are simple but radically wholesome gestures that encourage guests not only to interact with the spaces between point A and point B, but to enjoy them.

Extending the spirit of sachse’s work to the gallery, the opening itself sidesteps the art world’s typically impersonal, inaccessible standing-room only vibe by creating a unique environment where attendees can engage comfortably with the work from benches or ignore it entirely, huddling around mahjong tables and playing games with friends or making new ones while catching up on eachothers’ holidays.

The next day, sachse relishes the accomplishment with gobsmaked delight: “To see a gallery opening create a place where people don’t just pack the space but stay. Someone took a friggin’ nap. That was awesome.”

“To me this show was really the amalgation of all the conversations we’ve been having for a year. That’s why it feels so cohesive,” Cheng offers. “It feels like they’re all talking to each other because these were genuinely the conversations we were having with each other. To me this show represents all the relationships that we have built in the last year.”

The Gladstone show remains on display through 8pm today (Jan. 10), and reopens for a closing party during Long Winter, 7pm-2am on Saturday, Jan. 11. There, Tea Base is a Friend of Chinatown will spread beyond the second floor’s hallways to various activity rooms reflecting Tea Base’s weekly programming, creating dedicated spaces for guests to sing karaoke, make crafts, drink tea, and play mahjong or Smash Bros., also holding space for over-stimulated guests with a sensory chill out room.

Guests play mahjong at the opening for Tea Base is a Friend of Chinatown. Photo: Jae Ng. — Guests play mahjong at the opening for *Tea Base is a Friend of Chinatown*. Photo: Jae Ng.

In addition to their roles as art curators for the January Long Winter, Cheng and sachse will also be on site as the event’s accessibility ambassadors, available for one-on-one accompaniment to guests requesting special support at the front desk.

With funding made available through Toronto Arts Council, performances on Jan. 11 will also be accompanied by ASL interpretation, while live audio description is available for artworks.

All throughout January, Tea Base is conducting a membership drive, hoping to double its members. After Long Winter, they return to Tea Base HQ to launch a “Tea-brary” featuring books, zines, magazines and literature from the Pan-Asian diaspora on Jan. 16, and on Jan. 25, they’ll host a mahjong hall at AGO All Hours. As the group expands its reach throughout the city, they hope to forge new relationships that will make their efforts to support the community more sustainable.

It’s a labour of love, made all the more clear as the group points around the room back at Tea Base to a collection of humble furnishings that are secret artifacts from displaced Chinatown Centre shops, local businesses, DIY enterprises, and the community surrounding the undertaking: PA speakers from Double Double Land, a Mahjong table from April Aliermo, a soundbooth from internet radio station Banana Peel Radio, discarded stools from Dundas bar Big Trouble, a folding screen wall from another shuttered shop across the hall — even the space’s name came from the founder of arts incubator Diasporasian Futures, Jasmine Gui, while Abby Ho, DF’s artistic director, painted a mural adorning one of the walls.

“Everything here is a relationship,” Cheng reflects. I want to scale Tea Base through relationships.

“We’ve established ourselves as a group and I think we’ve established ourselves very well, so now it’s time to be like, okay, we’re here, who else is here,” Cheng continues. “Now we’re trying to build alliances and relationships with everyone else in Chinatown to see who has influence and the network and other relationships so we can combat this together.”