Wabi-sabi
en.wikipedia.org
Wabi-sabi
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Wabi-sabi
#2I 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.
Re: Wabi-sabi
#3This is an excellent term to throw around carelessly with your designer friends.
Re: Wabi-sabi
#4I 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.
Sort of weird to lump a whole region together. I'd agree though that traditional Japanese aesthetics include a lot of great descriptive terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aesthetics
Re: Wabi-sabi
#5I 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 ...
Re: Wabi-sabi
#6"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'.
Re: Wabi-sabi
#7When 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.
Re: Wabi-sabi
#8I 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.
Re: Wabi-sabi
#9I 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 ...
Is "pithy four-word idiom," in Chinese, a pithy four-word idiom?
Re: Wabi-sabi
#10This 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.
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 ;-)