This concept is useful, but I believe the wikipedia page is inaccurate in its description. For instance, I don't think that Ryōan-ji (the famous rock garden) illustrates wabi-sabi at all, and the teahouse is marginal. The teacup, on the other hand, is excellent.
"So now we have wabi, which is humble and simple, and sabi, which is rusty and weathered. And we've thrown these terms together into a phrase that rolls off the tongue like Ping-Pong. Does that mean, then, that the wabi-sabi house is full of things that are humble, plain, rusty, and weathered? That's the easy answer. The amalgamation of wabi and sabi in practice, however, takes on much more depth."
And I don't think ikebana (floral arrangement) is generally a reflection of wabi-sabi, much less haiku (section entitled "Wabi-sabi in Japanese arts").
Anyway, kind of a mess. Someone should fix that ;-)
"Wabi sabi" is a not a commonly used (or known) term in contemporary Japan, although it has been popularised in western art circles to exemplify a Japanese art. A more used term in Japan (as far as I have been told - I am not Japanese myself) which has a related meaning is 'mono no aware' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_no_aware ).
[edit] to plug a book on Japanese culture (as it was, rather than as it is now) to anyone with the time or interest, I highly recommend Bernard Rudofsky's 1965 book 'The Kimono Mind'.
Mild disagree on your first sentence: It has featured prominently in several TV profiles of local artists, including in self-aware commentary by artists about the aesthetic values they are aiming for. It's entirely possible that a Japanese person might not be familiar with it, in the same manner that baroque might be a baroque reference to many Americans, but my impression is that it is well within the realm of 常識. My wife (Japanese) was surprised when I asked her to confirm that.
I do agree that it gets thrown about as The Essential Guide To The Monolithic Japanese Art Tradition quite frequently on the other side of the Pacific, though. (Those are sarcasm caps.)
I just read this yesterday in the New Yorker piece about JD.[1]
When he was a teen-ager, Dorsey told me, he read a book about tea
ceremonies and was impressed by the Japanese precept of wabi-sabi,
which holds that the greatest beauty comes from organization with a
dash of disorder. “The monks rake up leaves, then they sprinkle a few
leaves back,” he explained.
'Then my favorite fellow Bubba, Jesse Gutierrez, came by to swallow some beers. He told me that he’s been studying Japanese esthetics, and that what I was talking about was "wabi-sabi," the beauty of the humble and the imperfect. Wabi-sabi, declaimed Jesse, his thumbs hooked into the straps of his overalls, was developed to its height by 15th-century tea masters who found that the finish of Chinese Ming porcelain began to cloy. They started buying and exalting absolutely plain Korean peasant ware, stuff that was cracked, distressed, flawed. It reminded them of the beauty of nature, autumn leaves on a stone path.'
I love how the East codifies aesthetics like this. My favorite is shibui which loosely translated (i'm told) means that every single detail of the object is simultaneously both useful and beautiful.
It's mostly a Japanese thing. In Chinese we don't have a lot of words for particular aesthetic qualities. However, if you want profane homophonic puns or pithy four-word idioms ...
Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It’s simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all. Wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores; aged wood, not Pergo; rice paper, not glass. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet-that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace liver spots, rust, and frayed edges, and the march of time they represent.
-Tadao Ando
It's another way I guess about looking at fashion and what you wear without care (or a little bit of care at least).
I am Italian, I have at least a vague idea of what Wabi Sabi is (I study ShoDo with a Japanese teacher), and you are wrong: the two terms are not even close, sorry.
This reminds me of BMW's asymmetric design concept car X-Coupe [0]. I remember reading something like "a little bit of asymmetry is more beautiful than perfect symmetry" in an auto mag back in 2001.
Said car is so not wabi-sabi on so many levels it is hard to begin. It has no character, as in the character that an object develops over time. It is not natural or made from materials that are on their way back to nature. Sure it is asymmetrical but all cars are - the exhaust pipe, the petrol cap and the steering wheel.
If you want an automotive analogy, I would look a lot further back, to those cars you find in Cuba, to that Fordson tractor abandoned in a field or a Soviet era truck somewhere in East Europe.
When I first head of wabi-sabi, it was to describe the aesthetic appeal of raw denim made on heirloom equipment -- the uneven weave caused by loom chatter, how dye gets everywhere, the uneven fade patterns, the leg twist caused by the skewed direction of the twill weave.
[+] [-] mturmon|12 years ago|reply
The long narrative history of older meanings of the two words is also not very helpful. Here's a much better summary (http://www.nobleharbor.com/tea/chado/WhatIsWabi-Sabi.htm) that reads in part:
"So now we have wabi, which is humble and simple, and sabi, which is rusty and weathered. And we've thrown these terms together into a phrase that rolls off the tongue like Ping-Pong. Does that mean, then, that the wabi-sabi house is full of things that are humble, plain, rusty, and weathered? That's the easy answer. The amalgamation of wabi and sabi in practice, however, takes on much more depth."
And I don't think ikebana (floral arrangement) is generally a reflection of wabi-sabi, much less haiku (section entitled "Wabi-sabi in Japanese arts").
Anyway, kind of a mess. Someone should fix that ;-)
[+] [-] twelvechairs|12 years ago|reply
[edit] to plug a book on Japanese culture (as it was, rather than as it is now) to anyone with the time or interest, I highly recommend Bernard Rudofsky's 1965 book 'The Kimono Mind'.
[+] [-] patio11|12 years ago|reply
I do agree that it gets thrown about as The Essential Guide To The Monolithic Japanese Art Tradition quite frequently on the other side of the Pacific, though. (Those are sarcasm caps.)
[+] [-] wozniacki|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hboon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexdevkar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autodidakto|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davesims|12 years ago|reply
http://nypress.com/farm-report-wabi-sabi/
'Then my favorite fellow Bubba, Jesse Gutierrez, came by to swallow some beers. He told me that he’s been studying Japanese esthetics, and that what I was talking about was "wabi-sabi," the beauty of the humble and the imperfect. Wabi-sabi, declaimed Jesse, his thumbs hooked into the straps of his overalls, was developed to its height by 15th-century tea masters who found that the finish of Chinese Ming porcelain began to cloy. They started buying and exalting absolutely plain Korean peasant ware, stuff that was cracked, distressed, flawed. It reminded them of the beauty of nature, autumn leaves on a stone path.'
[+] [-] dccoolgai|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhemao|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] britta|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmduke|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvnwng|12 years ago|reply
-Tadao Ando
It's another way I guess about looking at fashion and what you wear without care (or a little bit of care at least).
[+] [-] ot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pamar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swatkat|12 years ago|reply
[0]http://www.netcarshow.com/bmw/2001-x_coupe_concept/
[+] [-] Theodores|12 years ago|reply
Said car is so not wabi-sabi on so many levels it is hard to begin. It has no character, as in the character that an object develops over time. It is not natural or made from materials that are on their way back to nature. Sure it is asymmetrical but all cars are - the exhaust pipe, the petrol cap and the steering wheel.
If you want an automotive analogy, I would look a lot further back, to those cars you find in Cuba, to that Fordson tractor abandoned in a field or a Soviet era truck somewhere in East Europe.
[+] [-] skunkworks|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tichy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easytiger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qnm|12 years ago|reply