Gold leaf in concrete by Catherine Bertola, 2007
By Tadao Ando
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.
Wabi-sabi is underplayed and modest, the kind of
quiet, undeclared beauty that waits patiently to be discovered. It's a
fragmentary glimpse: the branch representing the entire tree, shoji screens
filtering the sun, the moon 90 percent obscured behind a ribbon of cloud. It's
a richly mellow beauty that's striking but not obvious, that you can imagine
having around you for a long, long time-Katherine Hepburn versus Marilyn
Monroe.
For the Japanese, it's the difference between kirei-merely "pretty"-and
omoshiroi, the interestingness that kicks something into the realm of
beautiful. (Omoshiroi literally means "white faced," but its meanings range
from fascinating to fantastic.) It's the peace found in a moss garden, the
musty smell of geraniums, the astringent taste of powdered green tea.
My
favorite Japanese phrase for describing wabi-sabi is "natsukashii
furusato," or an old memory of my hometown. (This is a prevalent mind-set
in Japan these days, as people born in major urban areas such as Tokyo and
Osaka wax nostalgic over grandparents' country houses that perhaps never were.
They can even "rent" grandparents who live in prototypical country houses and
spend the weekend there.)
Daisetz T. Suzuki, who was one of Japan's foremost
English-speaking authorities on Zen Buddhism and one of the first scholars to
interpret Japanese culture for Westerners, described wabi-sabi as "an active
aesthetical appreciation of poverty." He was referring to poverty not as we in
the West interpret (and fear) it but in the more romantic sense of removing the
huge weight of material concerns from our lives. "Wabi is to be satisfied with
a little hut, a room of two or three tatami mats, like the log cabin of
Thoreau," he wrote, "and with a dish of vegetables picked in the neighboring
fields, and perhaps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring
rainfall."
In Japan, there is a marked difference between a
Thoreau-like wabibito (wabi person), who is free in his heart, and a makoto no
hinjin, a more Dickensian character whose poor circumstances make him desperate
and pitiful. The ability to make do with less is revered; I heard someone refer
to a wabibito as a person who could make something complete out of eight parts
when most of us would use ten. For us in the West, this might mean choosing a
smaller house or a smaller car, or-just as a means of getting started-refusing
to supersize our fries.
The words wabi and sabi were not always linked,
although they've been together for such a long time that many people (including
D. T. Suzuki) use them interchangeably. One tea teacher I talked with begged me
not to use the phrase wabi-sabi because she believes the marriage dilutes their
separate identities; a tea master in Kyoto laughed and said they're thrown
together because it sounds catchy, kind of like Ping-Pong. In fact, the two
words do have distinct meanings, although most people don't fully agree on what
they might be.
Wabi stems from the root wa, which refers to harmony,
peace, tranquility, and balance.
Generally speaking, wabi had the original
meaning of sad, desolate, and lonely, but poetically it has come to mean
simple, non-materialistic, humble by choice, and in tune with nature. Someone who
is perfectly herself and never craves to be anything else would be described as
wabi. Sixteenth-century tea master Jo-o described a wabi tea man as someone who
feels no dissatisfaction even though he owns no Chinese utensils with which to
conduct tea. A common phrase used in conjunction with wabi is "the joy of the
little monk in his wind-torn robe." A wabi person epitomizes Zen, which is to
say, he or she is content with very little; free from greed, indolence, and
anger; and understands the wisdom of rocks and grasshoppers.
Until the fourteenth century, when Japanese society
came to admire monks and hermits for their spiritual asceticism, wabi was a
pejorative term used to describe cheerless, miserable outcasts. Even today,
undertones of desolation and abandonment cling to the word, sometimes used to
describe the helpless feeling you have when waiting for your lover. It also
carries a hint of dissatisfaction in its underhanded criticism of gaud and
ostentation-the defining mark of the ruling classes when wabisuki (a taste for
all things wabi) exploded in the sixteenth century. In a country ruled by
warlords who were expected to be conspicuous consumers, wabi became known as
"the aesthetic of the people"-the lifestyle of the everday samurai, who had
little in the way of material comforts.
Sabi by itself means "the bloom of time." It connotes
natural progression-tarnish, hoariness, rust-the extinguished gloss of that
which once sparkled. It's the understanding that beauty is fleeting. The word's
meaning has changed over time, from its ancient definition, "to be desolate,"
to the more neutral "to grow old." By the thirteenth century, sabi's meaning
had evolved into taking pleasure in things that were old and faded. A proverb
emerged: "Time is kind to things, but unkind to man.
Sabi things carry the burden of their years with
dignity and grace: the chilly mottled surface of an oxidized silver bowl, the
yielding gray of weathered wood, the elegant withering of a bereft autumn
bough. An old car left in a field to rust, as it transforms from an eyesore
into a part of the landscape, could be considered America's contribution to the
evolution of sabi. An abandoned barn, as it collapses in on itself, holds this
mystique.
There's an aching poetry in things that carry this
patina, and it transcends the Japanese. We Americans are ineffably drawn to old
European towns with their crooked cobblestone streets and chipping plaster, to
places battle scarred with history much deeper than our own. We seek sabi in
antiques and even try to manufacture it in distressed furnishings. True sabi
cannot be acquired, however. It is a gift of time.
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.
In home decor, wabi-sabi inspires a minimalism that
celebrates the human rather than the machine. Possessions are pared down, and
pared down again, until only those that are necessary for their utility or
beauty (and ideally both) are left. What makes the cut? Items that you both
admire and love to use, like those hand-crank eggbeaters that still work just
fine. Things that resonate with the spirit of their makers' hands and hearts:
the chair your grandfather made, your six-year-old's lumpy pottery, an afghan
you knitted yourself (out of handspun sheep's wool, perhaps). Pieces of your
own history: sepia-toned ancestral photos, baby shoes, the Nancy Drew mysteries
you read over and over again as a kid.
Wabi-sabi interiors tend to be muted, dimly lit, and
shadowy-giving the rooms an enveloping, womblike feeling. Natural materials
that are vulnerable to weathering, warping, shrinking, cracking, and peeling
lend an air of perishability. The palette is drawn from browns, blacks, grays,
earthy greens, and rusts. This implies a lack of freedom but actually affords
an opportunity for innovation and creativity. In Japan, kimonos come in a
hundred different shades of gray. You simply have to hone your vision so you can see, and feel, them all.
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