One, made by Pierre Sernet from 2001 to 2008 across the United States, France, Brazil, Japan, India, Peru, China, Egypt, and Vietnam, photographs tea encounters staged inside a portable, open cube.
Often referred to as Guerrilla Tea, the project developed in response to Sernet's perception of increasing cultural and political polarization around the beginning of the millennium, particularly after September 11, 2001 and during the Iraq War. Drawing on 16 years of study with the Urasenke school in New York, he uses Japanese tea practice to examine hospitality, difference, and coexistence. The title invokes ichi-go ichi-e, or "one encounter, one time," emphasizing each meeting as a singular shared moment. Harmony, purity, tranquility, and respect become both principles of the ceremony and a framework for asking whether apparently incompatible cultures can occupy a common space.
That common space takes the form of a thin cubic frame assembled within locations ranging from Times Square and a Rio favela to Ashokan Lake, Hạ Long Bay, the Great Wall, and Zululand. Inside it, Sernet and a volunteer or randomly selected guest share a bowl of tea. Photographed from sufficient distance to preserve the surrounding environment, the encounters appear as centered, deliberately staged actions embedded in busy streets, beaches, deserts, airports, and rural landscapes. The cube has no walls, so its geometry separates the ritual visually without concealing its social and geographic context. This creates a recurring contrast between concentrated gestures and the activity, architecture, or terrain around them.
The portable tea room consisted of 12 wooden sticks, a tatami mat, and tea utensils. Its abbreviated ceremonies lasted approximately 30 to 40 minutes and were often installed without advance permission, making performance, public intervention, and photography inseparable parts of the working method. Current editions are archival giclée pigment prints.
The project entered public view through performances and presentations at Sonnabend Gallery and Asia Society Museum in 2002, followed by a solo One exhibition at Gallery Charles Riva that year. Later venues included Mizuma Gallery, Felissimo Design House, Palais de Tokyo, Paris Photo, Landmarks Art Center, and the 2014 World Tea Artist Gathering in Reykjavík. Kyoto Journal presented the series in 2009 as "tea ceremony as portable public performance art." Subsequent criticism has interpreted the cube as a temporary refuge, a form of resistance, and a device for seeing familiar places differently.
