"One" The pictures in the tellingly titled series "One" show selected guests, drawn from a broad variety of backgrounds, sharing a bowl of tea with the kimono-clad artist. Sernet, a longtime student of the formal Japanese tea ceremony at the Urasenke School in New York, has been trained to perform the ritual in a traditional setting, where every accoutrement (flower, vase, hanging scroll, ladle, etc.) and every gesture (bowing, whisking, proffering the bowl, etc.) is freighted with prescribed meaning. For the "One" shots, however, he has replaced the conventional teahouse with a portable cube of the same size outlined in collapsible wood and metal tubing. Carrying this "conceptual space" to seemingly unlikely sites around the world—a favela in Rio, Times Square in New York, the Thar desert in India, a Pachinko parlor in Osaka—the artist creates in each locale a mini-refuge, allowing him to engage in private contemplation and in friendly encounters with curious strangers. Each person invited to participate in the venerable Japanese rite is free, in effect, to fill Sernet’s empty cube with his or her own mental reactions and constructs. The peacefulness that invariably ensues strongly suggests that, under the right circumstances, even apparently incompatible worlds and philosophies can be productively brought together. When hospitality is properly exercised, the higher values of humankind, unknowingly shared, emerge through an artful civility.
Reprinted from I LOVE YOU book Preface, Editions Le Cherche Midi, Paris, September 2005
