Wabi-Sabi in the context of Visual Arts
Musings from Leonard Koren's 1994 book "Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers.
Wabi-Sabi is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is the beauty of things modest and humble.
It is the beauty of things unconventional.
Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese life philosophy that beauty is not permanent, is imperfect, and is always incomplete. It exists in the shadows, the mundane, in the unconventional. It is the ruthless elimination of perfection, excess, and longevity. It is the philosophy of allowing all to be, as it is, beautiful.
Wabi-sabi eschews any decoration that is not integral to the structure - Get rid of everything unnecessary.
Wabi-Sabi is the philosophy of things imperfect. But what here defines perfect? This statement allows us to remove ourselves from unnecessary perfection. Or from the unneeded at all. To simply be content with what is functioning, what is real, and what is granted at any moment. To remove as much space as possible allows us to respect the tradition in the simplest forms.
The Wabi-Sabi philosophy originated in Japanese tea ceremonies. What were once ornate tea houses for the very rich in one generation became humble, imperfect, grounded spaces for all Japanese. Low entrances force tea-goers to get on hand and knees to enter the house, immediately forcing all castes to symbolically dissolve hierarchy. Bringing themselves to a level of basic human form where we exist imperfectly, once the ceremony begins
This reminds the architect to remove all but what is needed for the humble ceremony. Regardless of the observer.
In regard to the visual arts, this context reminds us to keep frames simple. To be constantly searching for the unneeded, the unintegrated, to strip frames down to their core aesthetic beauty. To find beauty in the simplest of forms.
Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness
Here, Wabi-Sabi reminds us of the second law of thermodynamics: everything in the universe is racing towards entropy. We and everything else on earth are either eroding or being built.
This philosophy, in plain terms, allows us to see things as they are again. It also doesn't advise us that something will be grander, better, or more beautiful in the next moment. It also doesn't mean that an item was more beautiful yesterday. The observer and the object exist now, in impermanence. We and the object are both racing towards degradation. We get right now.
In Visual Arts, being able to encapsulate environments or subjects as they are now. Often, we get caught in the trap of waiting for the better light, more interesting compositions, or the search for "perfection." What we have now is inherently beautiful in its purest form. It too will disappear into nothingness, and something new will be built. Understanding that we have no control over the essence of the universe allows us to fully envelop ourselves in the pureness of the moment.
The nothingness.
"And nothingness itself, instead of being empty space, is alive with possibility," a lesson that feels oddly close to Junichiro Tanizaki's argument from "In Praise Of Shadows."
So often in the West, we divert to white. We light our homes with overhead can lights; massive windows face south for sunlight; coffee shops and think-spaces are designed to leave no room for darkness. We only get the light. Beauty exists in the shadows, beauty exists in the possibility.
As Cinematographers, specifically commercial DPs, we rent every powerful fixture we can get. We set them up to fill the space with wonderful artificial light, and in our heads, we see it existing under perfect, otherworldly conditions. We check our monitors to look for clipped shadows. But are we missing the point? Are we leaving room for the nothingness? The possibilities that come with allowing the dark to live, breathe, be beautiful, to accentuate the light, to make our light more meaningful. Are we doing justice to the Wabi-Sabi that already exists in the space?
Beauty lies in the inconspicuous, overlooked details.
One of my favorite things to notice in nature is a flower growing out of a crack in the pavement, a juniper tree sprouting from the smallest granite crack on a cliffside. How many people stop to notice the miracle of life in the strangest places? Beauty exists everywhere. Life, however impermanent, for one moment, shows its strength in the strangest of conditions, no matter the circumstances. Not just in the Grand Canyon, or in a Rembrandt.
Slowing down enough to see it, understanding beauty lies in growth, and more importantly, in death, and everywhere in between. When I first started making images as a teenager, I was mentored by a phenomenal large-format film photographer, Jon Paul. We were out photographing the fall colors in Hope Valley, Ca. I was so naively focused on shooting this magnificent group of Aspen trees in their gold colors. I sat there for an hour trying to make a good image of the obvious, to no avail. Jon finally spoke up and gave me one of my most cherished pieces of advice - "turn around." Only to find out that he had just spent the time looking for the overlooked - a golden leaf in the small stream flowing through the aspen grove. It was beautiful, I had missed the point altogether.
As image makers, we're so drawn to the obvious options. Location scouts serve the storyboards, and when we arrive on location, we divert to whatever makes the most sense based on a 4"x4" square drawing, or a preconceived idea of a frame.
So every so often, I hear Jon's advice. I turn around, looking for those magnificent overlooked details, those instances of life, in whatever stage of entropy, existing just as they are, perfectly imperfect.
Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness
Wabi-Sabi does not choose between beauty and ugliness; it simply is. There is no disconnection between the two. There must be both in order to have both. Wabi-Sabi is coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Beauty can exist at any moment, given the proper context; it is an altered state of being.
"Since we already know what the correct design solutions are, Wabi-Sabi thoughtfully offers the wrong."
The visual student thus spends their earliest years learning the systems of beauty. They study the masters; they learn the framework, the rules, the narrow modernist idea of beauty in image-making.
Rules are great for image making and should inform technological decisions. But in the purest form of making frames, we should revert to feel.
Giving into the ugliness - forbidding the rules, and extracting the beauty from the object is a better guide to visual image making. The lifelong adage still stands true here, "You must know the rules to break them." Are we making technically correct images? Backlighting, Rembrandt triangles, L of the Room, exact balance of sensor information. Or are we creating images with a Wabi-Sabi balance, with the ugly, the incorrect, the not-obvious choices? To me, these are the better images. Give me the ugly, give me the real.
Focus on the intrinsic and not the material hierarchy
"Things Wabi-Sabi have no need for the reassurance of status or the validation of market culture."
In creating images for a living, we very often tie ourselves to the market culture. There is no doubt of this when the very existence of our careers past a hobby level is laid out on a profit and loss sheet at the end of the year.
Artists are up against the wall right now. AI is rapidly evolving to the point that it threatens the very human thread of art creation. The social media machine whirls insistently, impacting everything from our self-esteem to our mental capacity for new ideas. Companies, agencies, and productions, for no fault of their own, are trying to keep up with this bearish economy and require smaller budgets, crews, and fewer resources to feed the machine.
But does this matter to the heart of Wabi-Sabi? To the soul of the artist? There is no doubt that the reason we can deal with so much resistance to the creation of beauty is that, in our heart of hearts, we love it. We can't imagine a life without the flame.
The soul of Wabi-Sabi does not allow intrinsic social value to define beauty. We got into the terrifying, uncertain, and impermanent act of creating art because we simply can't create. Why are we creating for any other purpose than the enrichment of our souls, spirits, and livelihoods? Sure, that livelihood also includes paying rent and eating $13 stadium hot dogs, so there will always be an environment in which the creation is intrinsic. But why can't we, for a little while, create beauty for the soul? However fast that beauty races towards nothingness, it can also be built from the hands of its creator, as imperfect as they are, into something that resembles the spirit of the human imagination, and nothing else.
- AM 2.17.26 Park City, Utah