Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon tea break with our Afternoon Tea curators.
Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by Hua Li 化力.
Hua Li 化力‘s project has often worked the fruitful tension between opposing forces, whether being mixed-race, bisexual, or overtly political and softly vulnerable.
New single “Cherrier” is a song about coming of age in the late noughties in the Montreal neighbourhood, Plateau-Mont Royal. Grounded by a driving synth bass line, the song leaps from 2009 to 2019 and back again as Hua Li attempts to overturn traumatic memories of people and places she tried to avoid but kept getting pulled back to as a performer and DJ.
“Thankfully, since writing this song, I’ve been able to kiss again on Rue Cherrier and reclaim these parts of the city from a place of healing and celebration,” she says.
Stream + share the beat-driven bop, “Cherrier,” via your preferred platform.
Watch + share the official music video:
I had a once in a lifetime opportunity in 2021 to perform with Riit during the World Expo in Dubai. On one of our days off, we went to the historic gold souk and along the way I picked up a really delightful green tea with dried fruits and flowers. It’s got a great, bitter, Chinese green tea hit that always reminds me of my grandmother, but is also subtly sweet and lightly fragrant like an herbal tea.
I’m listening to “Roll With Me” by Jean Deux. The muddy hi hat roll paired with Jean Deux’s agile and graceful vocal tone mirrors the tea perfectly. I love living in duality, balancing two textures, concepts or feelings as harmonies rather than oppositions.
The visual piece I chose was Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” – talk about duality… The members of Pussy Riot involved in this performance were sent to a prison colony for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. I can’t help but feel the rapture in this performance and the blazing colours of their masks and dresses. They cross themselves as guards in all black drag them off the altar. A stark state interference to their glorious shriek for liberation from the state, from corruption, from all institutions that bind them. I’m amazed by their resilience – the group’s Nadya Tolokonnikova continues to create new work even after being imprisoned, being pronounced a foreign agent in 2021 and getting arrested in absentia in 2023. It reminds me that in the face of exile from a homeland you would sacrifice anything for, there is still art to be made.
Tea + Me 