Wabi-sabi for artists, designers, poets and philosophers
Leonard Koren
Introduction
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and imcomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of things unconventional.
The extinction of a beauty. The immediate catalyst for this book was widely publicized tea event in Japan. The Japanesae aesthetic of wabi-sabi has long been associated with the tea ceremony, and this event promised to be a profound wabi-sabi experience. Hiroshi Teshigahara, the hereditaty iemoto (grand master) of the Sogetsu school of flower arranging, had commissioned three Japan's most famous and fashionable architects to design and buid their conceptions of ceremonial tea-drinking enviroment. Teshigahara in addtionn would provide a fourth design . Afer a three- plus-hour train and bus ride from my office in Tokyo, I arrived at the event site, the ground of an old imperrial summer residence. To my dismay I found a celebration of goreousness, grandeur and elegant play, but hardly a trace of wabi-sabi. One slick tea hut, ostensibly made of paper, looked and smelled like a big white plastic umbrella. Adjacent was a structure made of glass, steel, and wood that had all the intimacy of a highrise office building. The one tea hose that approached the wabi-sabi qualities I had anticipated, gratuitous post-modern appendages. It suddenly dawned on me that wabi-sabi, once the preeminent high culture Japanese aesthetic and theacknowledged centerpiece of tea, was becoming-had becoming?-an endangered species.
Admittedly, the beauty of wabi-sabi is not to every one's liking. But i believe it is in everyone's interest to prevent wabi-sabi disappearing altogether. Diversity of the cultural ecology is s desirable state of affairs, especially in opposition to the acelerating trend towad the uniform digitalization of all sensory experience , wherein an electonic "reader" stands between experience and observation, and manifestation is encoded indentically.
In Japan, however, unlike Europe and to a lesser extent America. precious little material culture had been saved. So in Japan, saving a universe of beauty from extincation means, at this late date, not merely preserving particular objects or buildings,but keeping a fragile aesthestic ideology alive in any form of expression available. Since wabi-sabi is not easy to reducible to formulas or catch phrases without destroying its esense, saving it becomes a daunting task indeed.
Iealistic beauty. Like many of comtemporaries. I first learned wabi-sabi during my youth spiritual quest in the late 1960s . At that time, the traditional culture of Japan beckoned with profound "answers" to life's toughest questions. Wabi-sabi resolved my artistic dilemma about how to create beautiful things without getting catch up in the dispiriting materialism that usually surround such creative acts. Wabi-sabi- deep, multi-demenssional, elusive-appeared the perfect antidote to the pervasively slick, saccharine, corporate style of beauty that i felt was desensitizing American society. I have sice come to believe that wabi-sabi is relate tomany of the more emphatic anti-aesthestic that invariably spring from the young, modern, createvie sold: beat, punk, grunge, or whatever call next.
The Book of Tea redux. I first read about wabi -sabi in Kakuzo (a.k.a Tenshin) Okakura's touched on many aspects of wabi-sabi, he avoided using the term "wabi-sabi". He probably didn't want to confuse his readers with foreign words that were not absolutely essential to his discussion of aesthetic and culture ideas. (The book was witten in English for a non-Japanese aidience.) He may also have avoided explicit mention of wabi-sabi because th concept is so full of thorny issue for Japanese intellectual.
Almost a century later Okakura's book, howener, the term"wabi-sabi" makes a pefunctory appearance in practically every book and magazine article that discussed the tea ceremorny or other arcane things Japanese. Oddly enough, the two or three sentences used in these publications to describe wabi-sabi (the phrase of beginning of this introduction) are almost always the same. And the term is also used as a derisive shorthand by foreign and domestic critics to put down the sort of prissy dilettantism practicted by some devotees of Japan's traditional arts.
Perhaps now is auspicious culture moment to get beyond the standard definitions, todive a little more deeply into the murky depths. In this spirit I have searched for the various pieces of wabi-sabi--tarnished. fragmented, and in disrepair though they may be-andhave attemped to put them together into a meaningfil system. I've gone as far as the orthodox wabi-sabicommentator,historians, and cultural authorities have venture-and then I 've taken a few steps further. Reading between the lines, matching intention to actuality, I have attempted to grasp the totality, the holism of wabi-sabi, and make some sence of it.
The result, the skinny volume, is thus a tentative, personal first step toward "saving" what one constituted a comprehensive and clearly recognizable aesthetic universe.
