Olivier
Schneider

Trained in applied arts in Strasbourg and later graduating from the École supérieure des beaux-arts de Marseille, he became interested from the outset in systems capable of shifting the frameworks of perception. At the turn of the millennium, working under the pseudonym BlueScreen, he was among the pioneers of net art, exploring the immersive potential of light and sound, as well as the relationships between computer code and living systems. His work was presented across Europe, the Americas and Asia through performances, installations and immersive systems.

In the mid-2000s, he settled in Yunnan, in southern China. He then chose to suspend the production of artworks in order to devote himself to a long-term process of immersion and research within the tea cultures of the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia. For nearly two decades, he shared the daily lives of tea producers in the mountains of Yunnan, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand, placing listening, observation and learning before artistic production.

From this period of deliberate withdrawal emerged a distinctive approach at the intersection of historical inquiry, ethnographic observation and sensory experimentation. His research focuses in particular on tea’s plural history beyond dominant narratives, the concepts of terroir and cultural landscape, and the biological, chemical and cultural mechanisms that shape perception.

Over the years, he has become one of the leading voices on puerh tea and the tea traditions of the Golden Triangle. Today, he shares this knowledge through training courses, lectures, publications and international collaborations, while continuing work on a book devoted to this research. In parallel, he brings this expertise to independent tea houses, supporting them in their selection and sourcing projects and providing access to producers, terroirs and teas rarely available through conventional channels.

In recent years, Olivier Schneider has returned to making artworks, reinscribing this long immersion within a renewed artistic practice. The tea leaf becomes at once a material for experimentation, an artistic medium and a creative partner. His work explores the relationships between the plant world, gesture, temporality, perception and memory, as well as the ways in which tea, from the leaf to the gesture of sharing, can generate, transmit or alter sensory experience.

Olivier Schneider now lives on the border between Thailand and Myanmar. There, he owns a garden of century-old tea trees and a studio that together form the primary territory of his work: a constantly evolving space where practices of the living world, experimentation and creation converge.