About
The Exhibition
Go Have Tea is a digital and in-person exhibition created for the Chinese Pavilion at the 2026 Edmonton Heritage Festival. It follows three exhibition tables—Chinese tea, wellness and Edmonton goji stories, and bubble tea—through craft, migration, care, business, and everyday invention. Painting, calligraphy, fieldwork photographs, and familiar objects show how tea changes as it moves, and how people build new forms of home around it in Edmonton.
Why It Was Created
Public conversations about Chinese tea often move to two extremes: a timeless national tradition, or a simple consumer choice. Both leave out the people and relationships that make tea possible. Go Have Tea follows movement instead—a leaf becoming many teas, a plant taking root in Edmonton, a Taiwanese drink entering shops, franchises, and youth culture—to make that labour and history visible.
Curator
Junhong (Summer) Ma is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on contemporary Chinese and East Asian tea culture, public anthropology, migration, service labour, and the movement of tea knowledge across places. She holds a PhD from the University of Alberta and is a postdoctoral researcher at Xiamen University.
She created Go Have Tea to bring anthropological research into a public setting through objects, artworks, stories, and conversation. Rather than presenting Chinese tea as one timeless tradition, the exhibition follows how tea is made, carried, adapted, sold, remembered, and shared in everyday life.
Community Partner
Go Have Tea is presented as part of the Chinese Pavilion at the 2026 Edmonton Heritage Festival. CGAA has supported and sponsored Edmonton’s Chinese Pavilion since 1978, bringing together performances, arts, crafts, food, volunteers, and community participation.
Event Details
- Edmonton Heritage Festival 2026 — August 1–3, Hawrelak Park, Edmonton
- Saturday, August 1: 12:00 pm–9:00 pm
- Sunday, August 2: 10:00 am–9:00 pm
- Monday, August 3: 10:00 am–8:00 pm
- Presented as part of the Chinese Pavilion, supported by CGAA
Language: English website with a 中文 switch. Food and drink: display and educational activities only, unless a specific service is separately approved.