We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Haifang Luo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Haifang thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

For me, the most meaningful project has been co-founding Intangible Coffee with a group of friends in 2025. What makes it meaningful is not simply that we created a brand, but that it fundamentally changed my understanding of where art can exist.

As an artist, my work has long explored themes of time, memory, the body, and identity. For many years, I expressed these ideas primarily through painting and exhibitions, and I tended to think of art as something that exists within galleries, museums, or other dedicated art spaces.

My husband is a film director, and our other partners come from different fields. We were brought together by a shared love of pour-over coffee. We often spent time drinking coffee together while talking about art, film, and life. Gradually, we began to ask ourselves: could coffee, something we all deeply love, become a medium that connects the senses, memory, and imagination? Could we bring our creative ideas and artistic thinking into a coffee project, allowing art to move beyond exhibition spaces and enter everyday life in a more natural way?

Later, we used my works for the packaging design, and each coffee was named through a dialogue between its character, flavor profile, and references drawn from classic cinema, creating a cross-medium conversation between painting, film, and coffee.

For example, one light-roasted Ethiopia Organic Guji is named Poetry. With its bright, lively acidity and delicate floral aroma, it unfolds a rhythmically layered flavor experience on the palate. This dynamic complexity finds a subtle resonance with the lyrical intensity of the film Poetry, particularly its sensitivity to the details of life.

At the same time, within the quiet and hazy atmosphere of my painting Mystery, the image of a figure in contemplative stillness offers a sense of condensation and infinite imaginative space for this flowing sense of poetry and rhythm.

This project pushed me far beyond my familiar creative environment. As artists, we suddenly had to learn about entrepreneurship, branding, product development, operations, and customer relationships. The process was filled with uncertainty and challenges, and most of the time we were learning as we went. It taught me how to navigate uncertainty, and deepened my understanding of collaboration, responsibility, and perseverance.

The name “Intangible” reflects ideas that have long been central to my practice. In my paintings, I often try to capture things that are difficult to define yet deeply present in life: traces of time, fragmented and fading memories, subtle emotional connections between people, and feelings that cannot be fully expressed through language. The blurred, unfinished, and fluid imagery in my work reflects my understanding of the intangible. Through this project, I made my first attempt to bring these artistic ideas out of the studio and into everyday life in another form.

What makes this project so meaningful is not simply that we built a brand together, but that it expanded my understanding of creativity itself. Through Intangible Coffee, I began to see that art does not have to remain within the walls of galleries or studios. It can also exist in everyday rituals, conversations, and shared experiences. For me, this project was not only an entrepreneurial venture, but also a journey of growth, exploration, and discovering new possibilities for how art can live in the world.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I am an artist based in New York. My work explores themes of time, memory, the body, identity, and the ever-shifting relationship between image and reality. My practice spans contemporary mixed-media work, traditional Miantang-style Tibetan Thangka painting, and digital experimental art.

In recent years, my work has been exhibited in several shows, including ArtExpo New York (2022), the group exhibition Neutrals (2024), and Here and Now at Memor Museum (2025). These experiences have allowed me to engage with audiences from different backgrounds, while continually reflecting on the relationship between art, space, and everyday life.

If there is one particularly significant chapter in my artistic journey, it would be the four and a half years I spent in Tibet between 2015 and 2019, studying traditional Miantang-style Thangka painting under Master Tenpa Rabten. In the relatively secluded and serene environment of the highlands, the long-term focus and repetitive discipline required by Thangka practice gradually made me realize that creation is not only a form of expression, but also a practice of time itself. During that period, preparing a hand-poured coffee before painting gradually became part of my daily rhythm, subtly shaping my understanding of ritual, tempo, and everyday structure.

After that experience, I began developing my series The Lost Memories. Unlike the strict and systematic structure of Thangka painting, this body of work relies more on intuition and spontaneity, attempting to capture fragments of memory, fading emotions, and fleeting thoughts. I became interested in how images carry time, and how memory is continuously reconstructed as it fades.

In 2020, when the world entered a state of stillness and isolation, my practice shifted again. As daily life became increasingly mediated through digital platforms, I began using publicly sourced imagery as material, moving from personal memory toward a broader spectrum of human emotional experience. This stage led me to focus more on fragments that exist between familiarity and estrangement—visual traces that feel suspended in time, fragile yet charged with tension.

Beyond painting, I co-founded Intangible Coffee with a group of friends. The project extends the core questions of my artistic practice: how perception, memory, and emotion can be translated into everyday experience. We use coffee as a medium to extend these reflections into daily life.

We all share a deep love for pour-over coffee and the slow, attentive process it requires. In a way, this experience mirrors artistic creation—it depends on time, perception, and subtle transformation. Based on this idea, we work with specialty coffee, using high-quality beans from renowned origins and highlighting their distinct flavor profiles through fresh roasting.

In this project, my paintings are used in the packaging design, while each coffee is named through a dialogue between visual language, flavor characteristics, and references from classic cinema. In this way, we aim to create a cross-medium conversation where image, taste, and narrative collectively shape the experience.

For me, Intangible Coffee is not separate from my artistic practice, but an extension of it into everyday life. I hope that in ordinary moments of pause—whether viewing an artwork, drinking coffee, or simply reflecting—people can encounter those emotions, memories, and imaginations that are difficult to define, yet deeply present in lived experience.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

If I were to share a story that best reflects my resilience, it would be my experience studying Thangka painting in Tibet.

From 2015 to 2019, I studied traditional Miantang-style Thangka painting under Master Tenpa Rabten in Tibet. The learning process was extremely long and demanding, requiring a high level of patience, focus, and discipline. Through constant repetition, each day of practice became an ongoing exercise, gradually turning into a rhythm of daily life.

During that time, my understanding of “time” began to shift and become more tangible. It was no longer an abstract concept, but something that could be felt and experienced. Creation was no longer simply about producing an artwork, but about sustained engagement over time. Each precise brushstroke became a trace of time itself.

Although the experience may appear difficult from an outside perspective, it ultimately became one of the most important turning points in my artistic journey.

Looking back, what I gained was not only the technical practice of Thangka painting, but also the ability to keep moving forward even when the outcome is not yet visible, and to maintain a steady inner rhythm amid slowness and uncertainty. This way of working continues to influence my artistic practice, my life, and the way I approach new challenges.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the ability for long-term ideas of exploration and reflection to continue evolving through different forms over time.

My work has always focused on time, memory, emotion, and experiences that are difficult to define yet deeply real. In the past, I mainly expressed these ideas through painting. Later, when Intangible Coffee was created, I realized that these concerns did not disappear with a change of medium; instead, they found new ways of existing and being experienced.

We brought painting, film, coffee, and everyday life into dialogue, integrating questions of perception, memory, and imagination into this project. From visual presentation to naming, and even to the way people brew and experience the coffee, each element continues to extend the same underlying inquiry.

What feels most rewarding to me is not simply having created a coffee brand, but seeing how art can extend beyond galleries and studios into people’s lived, everyday experiences. In that space, art and daily life are no longer separate, but intertwined on a deeper level. For me, this form of connection is more meaningful than any single outcome.

At the same time, as a relatively new brand, Intangible Coffee was featured in the artist merchandise section of Memor Museum, entered several local supermarkets, and launched on platforms such as Etsy and Amazon in 2025. For us, these developments are not only markers of commercial growth, but also signs that the ideas we believe in are beginning to enter more people’s everyday experiences.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://intangiblecoffee.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/haihai.art/

Image Credits

Haifang Luo; Libo Wang