The Coffee Dreamscape

The sky changes colour through seven periods of Taipei’s day, warming to gold in the evening, with stars and a moon after eight at night. The weather changes only the amount and colour of the clouds, and the rain. The six images below are final renders from 15 July 2025, ten days before the opening.

There is deliberately no explanation in the café; here the backstage is laid open. The work listens to four things at once. Each changes only part of the picture, and some only show when the next section is painted.

People are counted with a security camera the café already had. Its picture is first corrected to a view of the seating, then passed to person detection several times a second. For each person found, the work receives a single number: where they are from left to right. It does not identify anyone and does not know who is who.

This is the work’s internal dashboard in the café; it is never shown on the wall. It lays out on one page what the work is listening to: how many people are in the seating area, how many cups of each drink in the last twenty minutes, which two palettes the next sea will be drawn from, and Taipei’s weather. The two images below were reshot with demonstration data, with the camera panel replaced by a diagram.

In March 2024 Starbucks set out four directions: the work should last and change with time and temperature, its images should make sense to anyone and feel like coffee, it should extend the store environment, and ideally it should let customers take part. Che-Yu Wu’s proposal grew out of his flower brush works. In June the first coffee tree, on a black ground, appeared in his daily sketches. In July came Fantom Sea, the forerunner of the second act. In September he borrowed the idea of a music sequencer, so that the coffee trees, the terrain and the sea are painted on separate tracks at once. The first item on his October to-do list reads: make the landscape less abstract, more literal.

In November and December he was on a residency in Paris, where he built a dynamic watercolour and three-dimensional brush-stroke system, which he brought back into every scene. In spring 2025 the mountains changed: the terrain is now computed in three dimensions first, the direction of the light then decides the colour of each stroke, and only then is the stroke laid down. He describes this work as using rational means to approach a deeply emotional state. On 16 July 2025 the picture lit up on the café wall for the first time; it opened on 25 July.

He says time was the hardest part: the picture had to hold from morning to night, with Taipei’s current weather and time poured back into it. What pleases him most in the finished work is the sky and the terraced coffee fields.

The brushwork has its own history. Che-Yu Wu’s brush works began with flowers, painting the gradients of petals like oil paint, then sunflowers, shaking the strokes as they rendered, up to the red spider lilies of 14 June 2024; three days later the same strokes painted the first version of the coffee tree. Another source is Matt DesLauriers’s Meridian: he bought the book in which the artist describes the series, to learn how light can be translated into the texture of a brush. Further back are Monet and Van Gogh.