Last Weekend at Oblique Table

Last weekend, Oblique Table and Scented Stranger 香间旅人 spent two days exploring scent from two very different directions.

One evening began with almost nothing to do — except smell.

The next invited us to sit down, work with botanical materials, and slowly shape scent into something we could take home.

Together, the two gatherings became the beginning of our September theme at Oblique Table:

A Month of Scent & Memory — Tracing the Places We’ve Been.

Throughout the month, we are looking at scent not simply as fragrance, but as a way of noticing materials, seasons, places, and the memories we carry with us.

Chinese herbs and natural incense materials prepared for a scent and memory workshop at Oblique Table in New York City.

Friday Night: Discovering Chinese Herbal Aromas

For our first gathering, guests arrived for a guided sensory journey through Chinese herbs and incense materials.

Instead of beginning with names, properties, or explanations, we began with an eye mask.

Guests smelled each material before knowing what it was and paid attention to what appeared first: perhaps a color, a place, a person, a season, or simply a feeling. The same botanical material was also experienced in different forms — raw, warmed between the hands, and released through smoke — to notice how dramatically scent could shift with temperature and preparation.

There was no correct answer to find.

One scent could remind someone of a childhood home, while the person sitting beside them might think of wet wood, medicine, rain, or somewhere they had never been able to name.

Guests recorded these associations through colors, images, symbols, and short notes, creating their own scent self-portraits before sharing what they had discovered around the table.

At the end of the evening, everyone left with a small collection of things connected to the experience: aromatic herbs, incense, their scent portrait, and a sealed memory to return to later.

What interested us most was not whether someone could identify a material correctly.

It was the moment before identification — when the body had already responded, but the mind had not yet decided what something meant.

Scent Rituals: A Hands-On Incense Workshop

Create Your Own TCM Essential Oil Blend

From Smelling to Making

Our second gathering moved from memory into the hands.

This time, guests worked with natural incense materials to create their own hand-shaped cone incense, using a seasonal incense dough inspired by Báilù / 白露, White Dew, one of the 24 traditional Chinese solar terms.

White Dew arrives at the edge of summer and autumn. The days may still feel warm, but evenings become cooler, morning dew begins to appear, and the season gradually turns inward. Our incense materials reflected this transition through botanicals associated with early autumn, including chrysanthemum, osmanthus, and other natural aromatic ingredients.

Before making anything, we spent time smelling and handling the materials and talking about their relationship to season and everyday Chinese scent traditions.

Then came the quieter part: shaping.

Guest exploring Chinese herbs and scent materials during an Oblique Table x Scented Stranger sensory workshop in New York City.

Guests rolled and formed their incense by hand, leaving some pieces simple and experimenting with dried flowers, spices, and natural powders on others. Each person eventually created around 10–15 incense pieces, along with a personal scent recipe card to remember what they had made.

There was no rush to finish.

The act of shaping the material — pressing, rolling, adjusting, starting again — became as important as the object itself.

And occasionally, the material wandered away from its expected form completely.

A piece of incense became a crane.

That is something we love about making: once a material enters someone else’s hands, it can carry traditions forward without having to remain exactly as it was.

Why Scent?

At Oblique Table, we are interested in making as a way of paying attention.

New York asks us to identify things very quickly.

What is it?
What is it for?
Do I like it?
What comes next?

Our workshops try to create a little space before those questions.

A herb can be smelled before its name is revealed.

A material can be touched before its meaning is explained.

A cultural tradition can be entered through the senses rather than presented only as information.

And sometimes a smell reaches somewhere in us before language does.

That is why September at Oblique Table is centered around Scent & Memory.

Together with Scented Stranger, we are exploring Chinese scent traditions, botanical materials, seasonal rituals, memory, and contemporary making — not as something preserved behind glass, but as something that can still be touched, interpreted, worn, burned, shaped, and lived with today.

For us, the finished object is only part of the workshop.

What matters just as much is the time around the table: noticing an unfamiliar material, hearing what someone else remembers, working slowly with your hands, and discovering that the same scent can contain completely different stories.

Come curious. Make something slowly. See what stays with you.

Oblique Table × Scented Stranger
New York City