- May 30 – August 15, 2026
- Opening reception May 30, 2026, from 1-4pm
UNIT/PITT presents Solar Bee Garden Tea Zen REMIX, a site-responsive, multi-media collaboration by Lam Wong and Peter Courtemanche (Absolute Value of Noise), May 30 – August 15, 2026. Curated by Ali Bosley.
Moving between U/P’s gallery & garden, the exhibition draws on ceremony, analogue audio/visual experimentation, and garden-centred practice as modes of relational and ecological inquiry. Wong and Courtemanche are longtime friends whose highly distinct and individual practices inevitably culminate around tea — its cultivation, preparation, offering, and ingestion — as a medium and contemplative methodology. Solar Bee Garden Tea Zen REMIX marks their first collaboration, and a meeting of two very distinct artistic languages held together by philosophical kinship and the patient time and texture of the garden.
The exhibition will also feature a series of special events including an artist talk and exhibition tour, a Tea Painting Table Performance Ceremony facilitated by Wong (a participatory event where the public contributes to evolving artwork through tea staining, tea leaves, and calligraphy), a film screening, and special music performances.
We are also pleased to announce that Skwxwu7mesh/Sto:Lo artist, ethnobotanist, and cultural practitioner Tʼuyʼtʼtanat-Cease Wyss will be facilitating an iteration of her ReciprociTea project alongside Lam and Peter. More information and dates to come.
Artist Bios
Absolute Value of Noise (Peter Courtemanche) is a sound artist living in Vancouver. He works with radio, sound installation, and electronics in indoor and outdoor locations. Since 1988, he has created many radio pieces that have been heard around the world on national radio stations, community radio, and temporary radio stations set up for arts festivals and radio-art events. He likes to work with “gadgetry” – bio-electric analog circuits, wire coils, magnetic transceivers, and “little electronic brains” that observe and respond to local phenomena. His outdoor installations typically integrate solar-powered electronics with plants. These works investigate themes of bio-diversity, extinction, and fragile eco-systems. They emphasize the invisible, drawing attention to things people normally overlook or avoid/dislike (insects, lichen, moss, weeds, pollution). Information on his work can be found at https://absolutevalueofnoise.ca.
Lam Wong‘s work bridges time. It connects different points in history with the present: distant past, recent past, moments of contemplation, moments of challenge/crisis, what we might find in the future. He is fascinated by the connections that develop between art works and viewers. He works to build relationships that bring to light the invisible, the gaps and intervals, and a sense of mystery. Lam is a visual artist and curator who immigrated from Hong Kong to Canada during the 1980s and studied design, art history, and painting in Alberta and British Columbia. He works with painting, installation, and performance to engage with themes such as the perception of reality, the role of art, and the relationship between time, memory, and space. He sees art making as an ongoing spiritual practice, and his work draws upon his knowledge of Western art history and his interest in Taoism and Buddhism.