Wabi-Sabi: The Sublime of Nature and the Gifts of Imperfection

Recently, I read a book titled “Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers” by Leonard Koren. This small brown book, with a rough paper cover and thick sheets, had been collecting dust in my bookcase for months. My dad picked it up for me at a museum gift shop, and it seemed to be more of a roughly-constructed pamphlet than treatise on Japanese art history. But of course, the books that I disregard at first are often my eventual favorites, and this one is no exception. Koren’s exploration of the concept of wabi-sabi not only proved a fascinating glimpse into Japanese art history and aesthetics, but provided existential precepts topical to my own life.

This book explores the Japanese cultural institution of wabi-sabi, a concept ill-defined by its very nature. However, being heavily associated with Zen Buddhism--“exemplifying [its] core spiritual-philosophical tenets”-- the simplest way to think of wabi-sabi is “the Zen of things”. As for its place in Japanese history, the wabi-sabi aesthetic mostly exists in the context of the tea ceremony, as with the wabi-sabi bowl pictured below, used in Japanese tea ceremonies.

The Japanese tea ceremony incorporates architecture, painting, interior design, performance, even food preparation and flower arranging. Combining these various disciplines to work together in harmony, and realizing wabi-sabi, was the ultimate goal of the tea ceremony. The beginning of wabi-sabi in tea was a tea master named Shuko, who-- in opposition to the previously popular polished, elegant, foreign-made tea objects--sourced local, variegated utensils whenever possible. Then, the following tea master, Rikyu, expanded upon this emphasis on imperfection, nature, and wabi-sabi:

“It was in the midst of this cultural flux that Rikyu secured his most enduring aesthetic triumph: to unequivocally place crude, anonymous indigenous Japanese and Korean folkcraft--things wabi-sabi-- on the same artistic level, or even higher than, slick, perfect, Chinese treasures.” (Koren 33)

A rough idea of wabi-sabi can be ascertained from its history in teahouses, but the fact remains that it is a somewhat mysterious aesthetic term. As such, viewing it from the lens of another major aesthetic movement is helpful, so one can determine what this movement is and is not. And, thankfully for us, wabi-sabi bears incredible resemblance to Modernism. Both terms encompass both aesthetics, objects, spaces, even ideology and lifestyle; both are aesthetic terms/movements that can be applied to individual pieces of work. They both disregard any decoration that is unnecessary to structure. Finally, both are conceptual, non-representational standards for beauty.

However, Modernism and wabi-sabi are also majorly different: material, aesthetic priorities, among other things. But these relevant differences are most concisely described by Koren himself; as such, I have transcribed (a hyphenated version) of the list of differences between Modernism and Wabi-sabi found in the book:

(Koren 27-28)

But how does this movement appear in American culture, and how can we further familiarize ourself with its aesthetic criteria through an example in context? Wabi-sabi originated in the Japanese teahouse, but as Eastern religious ideas cross-pollinated to the West, wabi-sabi—the “Zen of things”—did as well. So, to further elucidate why this movement is important to American readers now, and not just the Japanese tea masters of the past, we can examine a familiar, American example of wabi-sabi piece of art: Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson.

This year, I’m taking AP Art History, and this piece features predominantly in the earthwork section of the curriculum. But perhaps calling it a “piece” is disingenuous: after all, it wouldn’t merit the title wabi-sabi if it sat collecting dust in a museum, with a sleek polished frame slapped on top. Spiral Jetty is a spiral quite literally carved into a lake: the water is red, the rocks basalt (image below). The look of it has ebbed and flowed with time, as salt rocks develop and the water nearby changes hues. Unless you trek out to Utah, the work can only be seen via photograph, which cannot completely do it (and its scale) justice.

But what makes it wabi-sabi? First, aesthetically: by its very nature, the spiral is not a straight, perfect line. It is also composed of earth, and is therefore variegated and imperfect. No one stone can be the same, and no stone can be completely polished or “perfect”. It simply is. More conceptually, the spiral itself evokes entropy, or the physics concept that everything is either evolving or devolving towards disorder. Thus, wabi-sabi revolves around the constant ebb and flow of life, and Spiral Jetty does too: in describing the work, Smithson rephrases “the Zen of things” to the “coming and going of things”, but the sentiment remains.

In addition to the obvious COVID and climate change connections, I find that wabi-sabi—and the Smithson piece specifically—are valuable to my personal life as well. The lack of control so vividly communicated in their collective aesthetic is still aspirational for me, an archetypical control freak; and yet, they continue to serve as helpful reminders that letting go is where the most beauty lies.

Pick up “Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers” if you have the chance! Link here.