I went to Japan to understand a typically Japanese concept that I had read about: Wabi Sabi
This concept arises from teachings of Zen Buddhism and since in Unit 2 I had studied the development of Buddhist art in India in ancient times, I thought it would be appropriate to look at Buddhism in the Far East in contemporary times. The concept is important to me as a psychologist because it has its parallels in psychotherapy: as humans we are imperfect beings, we are damaged by events that shape us and we hurt each other. Often we are terrified as we come up against evidence of our own mortality and insignificance, we start many things and do not finish them, we have dreams and sometimes we have to recognise that these dreams will never realise themselves. Built into the very fabric of life itself is impermanence, incompleteness and imperfection. Yet some of us learn to coax beauty out of the mess we live in. some of us learn to live graciously and die gracefully. This is the spirit of Wabi Sabi: embrace impermanence, accept incompleteness, love imperfection.
From the viewpoint of traditional Chinese and Japanese art, Wabi Sabi art is therefore seen as ’rustic’ and crude. It is sometimes purposely damaged by the creator in or to spoil the perfection of the piece. To us in west, the closest to Wabi Sabi is the appreciation of the ‘rustic’, a design that's natural, rough, aged, and casual. In order to embody the rustic, our kitchens are clothed in ‘distressed’ wood.
Prof Steve Dodd is a Professor of Japanese Literature at SOAS and in Tokyo. In consultation with him, I planned my route: I would visit Naoshima Island, Nara, Kyoto and Osaka.
Naoshima Island is known as the Art Island of Japan, Kyoto and Nara are renowned for Buddhist and Shinto shrines and Osaka is a bustling business city. If Wabi Sabi was present in the minds of contemporary Japanese artists I would surely find it here.
There are 4 main galleries on Naoshima.
The Art House project
The Chichu Museum
The Lee Ufan Museum
The Benesse Museum
Naoshima was developed by two men Tetsuhiko Fukutake who was the president of Futake Publishing and Chikatsugu Miyake who was the incumbent mayor of Naoshima. The architect of some of the buildings was Tadao Ando whose use of concrete and space to create ambience and atmosphere is as important to the vision of Naoshima as is the two men above. The first museum opened in 1992.
The Art House Project consists of six different venues containing art from all over the world. The journey to the island is arduous and the journey around the six houses feels like a pilgrimage in silence and Zen Buddhism. The art is modern, even though 5 Monets sit in one of the rooms of the Chichu Museum. Many of you will already know that Monet’s Water Lilies paintings were inspired by Japanese Zen Gardens and that he spent many hours contemplating them in his purpose built water garden in France. Thus it is entirely in keeping with the rest of the work, that Monet should find a home here.
I only have time to consider a few of the artworks and I will select those that spoke to me .
James Turrell is a light artist. He plunges his viewers into a darkness so complete that we had to keep our hands on the walls in order to find our way about. It was a frightening experience. We were then invited to sit and wait for five minutes, and as we waited a rectangular screen appeared in front of us. We were then invited to get up and touch the screen. We found our way in the dark to the screen only to find that there was nothing there. We were told that the the level of illumination had not changed since we had entered the room but that our eyes had become accustomed to the darkness.
This piece of art took me to a place of existential aloneness where I considered issues of life and death and mortality, being and nothingness. Impermanence. But here is perfection and completeness. Utterly beautiful but not Wabi Sabi. And not Japanese.
Walter De Maria was an American artist (1933-2013), sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New York City. Walter de Maria's artistic practice is connected with Minimal art, Conceptual art, and Land art of the 1960s.
It is impossible to describe the scale of this work. It is gigantic and awe inspiring. It creates a sense of serenity, stillness, contemplative silence. A sense of the largeness of the Universe and the insignificance of human life. It is perfect, complete and permanent. Not Wabi Sabi.
Yayoi Kusama is an 89 year old Japanese American artist. She was born in Japan and ‘escaped’ to New York at the age of 27 in order to avoid being finished off by fine etiquette and an arranged marriage. She is an icon of the island such that even the public buses pay homage to her art and all the tourist knick knacks seem to be dotted or spotted.
Yayoi Kusama is of particular interest to me, a psychologist, because of her obsession with dots. Kusama has lived in a psychiatric hospital for over 4 decades only leaving it to work in her studio by day and returning to it by night.
She paints in the expanded field. A comprehensive article on her life is to be found at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/sep/23/yayoi-kusama-infinity-film-victoria-miro-exhibition
In her words, ‘ my dots escape the canvas.’
While fascinating and intriguing Kusama’s art seems closer to me to Pop Art (Andy Warhol etc.) than to Wabi Sabi
Lee Ufan is a Korean born (1936-) artist who in my opinion embodies most closely Wabi Sabi. He founded the MONHA school of Avantgarde art. Often he uses merely a single brush stroke, as above.
“The work is never complete, because there is no perfection or completeness,”
His works are titled
Shadow Room, Silence Room, Meditation Room, Void, Correspondence Place, Encounter Room, Pole Room
Here is a video that demarcates his philosophy of art: it is titled ‘Marking Infinity’
The work that engaged me most was Relatum -Shadow of a Stone, a darkly lit space in which is placed a large rock in the shadow of which is a pool of water, and in the water a video is projected from above portraying emptiness, then the emergence of plant life, then animals, then night with the moon , then day. The whole of evolution in a minute. This did indeed seem to portray Wabi Sabi: the imperfection of the rock, the impermanence and incompleteness of human living. A breath taking experience. But Lee Ufan is Korean (Korea is a rival and economic competitor of Japan) and not Japanese. Where is the Japanese expression of Wabi Sabi?
Overwhelmed with the beauty of the art in Naoshima but somewhat under-whelmed by the presence of Japanese art inspired by Zen Buddhism we travelled next to Nara which is famous for the tallest Buddha in the world. It sits 16 metres high and was built in the Nara Period (AD 710-794). It was destroyed by fire twice and the current structure is smaller than the original one and was built in the Edo Period (1615-1868). I am fascinated by semiotics in art and here we see symbolism in the hands of the Buddha: the left hand of blessing and the right hand of welcome.
Though impermanent because of the materials that they are made from, the art pieces here are the epitome of perfection and completeness. Thus in no way Wabi |Sabi.
Thus far I had not come across any modern Japanese art so it was a relief to find The National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. The whole museum is dedicated to the work of Insho Domoto and his brother, Shikken whose lacquer work is exquisite.
I revelled in the art of Insho Domoto because of his use of black and gold leaf and red. It spoke to me because of my own use of these colours and materials. But was this finally Wabi Sabi expressed in Japanese art? I think not. There is nothing ‘rustic’ about these pieces.
Thus far I had not found enough Modern Japanese work to fill my soul. And I had not found any evidence of Wabi Sabi.
The tea ceremony is a highly ritualised practice that originated as an exercise in mindfulness, respect and focus on the Now. It requires precision of hand movements and graceful choreography. It consists of a series of prescribed movements which culminate in the drinking of matcha, which is a green tea. People spend many years perfecting the art of making these movements. Traditionally tea was served in the finest of utensils, laced with gold.
Wabi Sabi was a reaction to the pretentious displays of the traditional tea ceremony.
Sen no Rikyu in the 16 th Century was a priest in the court of Hideyoshi who was a general in the army. Hideyoshi was deeply enamoured of finery and gold and elaborate displays of wealth. Rikyu instead pared back the tea ceremony to its roots in meditation, using ordinary if sometimes even ugly utensils to perform the ceremony. Espousing the deeply spiritual Buddhist philosophy of impermanence, incompleteness and imperfection, he gathered a great following which made Hideyoshi jealous. Hideyoshi also did not like the aesthetic of Wabi Sabi as it went against his own aesthetic of gorgeousness and so ordered Rikyu to revoke his practice. Rikyu refused and Hideyoshi ordered Rikyu to commit suicide. Which he did, rather than give up his ideology. The tea ceremony remains today as a ritualistic practice engaged in by traditional Japanese on special occasions. This, it seems to me, to be the last vestige of Wabi Sabi in Japan.
We see Mai’s mother in the group photo, a wonderful, gracious, hospitable woman who treated us to an experience of the tea ceremony.
In Osaka now, and experiencing the absence of contemporary Japanese art, I was incredibly fortunate to stumble upon an exhibition of the Japanese ‘New Wave: Contemporary Art of the 1980s’ showing at The National Gallery of Art in Osaka. I spent 4 hours at this exhibition looking for evidence of Wabi Sabi. Though there are some outstanding pieces this show not least of which is a beautiful piece by a Japanese artist whose name was written in Japanese and so was undecipherable to me. I have brought the catalogue so that Mai can read the name for me. This woman artist discovered that, after an accident, the language centre of her brain had been damaged and she could no longer process words. In the above piece we see a man and a woman and there are letters from Kanji (the tighter Chinese style) and from Hiragana (the looser alphabets) but no words. This piece among all the other pieces spoke the most to me of Wabi Sabi: a rustic material embodying damage, imperfection, incompleteness and impermanence.
Where is Wabi Sabi in Japan today? In my view of things, which is based on an inadequate sample of 10 days of exploration, though intense, Wabi Sabi is significant by its absence. Except in miniscule pockets such as the one described in the previous slide, I perceive a return to an aesthetic of gorgeousness and glitter. Or if not this, then Anime and Manga art has captured the imagination of the contemporary Japanese artist.
Note: Anime (Japanese animation) and Manga (a style of Japanese comic books typically written for adults as well as children).
Gareth is a visual artist who is doing a PhD in psycho geography. He is looking at how individuals are impacted by their environment as they walk through it and also at how the environment is impacted by the individuals who walk through it.
Gareth is married to a Japanese woman and has lived in Japan for 18 years.
He has mapped the 6 central stones of Leeds onto the city of Osaka and on his walks with groups of people he invites them to stop at each of these 6 places. The walk takes about 2.5 hours and during this time we had many conversations about Japan, the people its culture. At the last venue, Gareth handed us post-its and asked us to write something of inspiration for other people and to hide this piece of paper in the vicinity of an iconic cherry tree, so that it could be found while being semi-invisible. I wrote the following based on a talk by Richard Rohr, a Benedictine monk whose work inspires me: ‘Make it easy for people to love you and you will be blessed.’ thus Gareth is creating art as he forms bonds with people.
When I asked Gareth about Wabi Sabi mentioning that it seemed to be significant by its absence in contemporary Japanese art, he told me that I would be hard pressed to find it.
I quote from Leonard Koren’s book, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers.
‘It suddenly dawned on me that Wabi Sabi, once the pre-eminent high culture Japanese aesthetic and the acknowledged centrepiece of tea, was becoming-had become?-an endangered species.… I believe it’s in everyone’s interest to prevent wabi sabi from disappearing altogether.’ Page 8.
Lorraine Nanke observes that ideas often descend in one place and ascend in another and then are restored to the place of origin.
For example In the 80s Gandhianism was more prevalent in certain parts of England than it was in India until recently when people in India were made aware of the elegant beauty of the philosophy.
The Beatles’ trip to India under the aegis of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had the same effect of giving back to the everyday modern Indian its inherent spirituality .
So I have begun painting in the spirit of Wabi-Sabi
I did the above painting while in Osaka. It depicts the utensils used in the tea ceremony. It is imperfect as is seen in the unevenness of the text, it is incomplete as is seen in the emptiness of the space surrounding the utensils and it is impermanent having been executed on cheap A2 paper using cheap utensils i.e. acrylic paint pens.
Here are a few more of my works done during my trip to Japan
The way I look at it is as follows.
My art is:
1)Autobiographical therefore insignificant, referring to the incompleteness of one human life in within the wave of human history.
2)Related to immediate experience of the Now or memories of the past which exist in the Now. The Buddhist notion of Mindfulness is evident here.
3)On cheap paper so it will not last. Impermanence.
4)Done with ’crude utensils’ a marginalized art medium i.e. Sharpies.
I hope to revive the concept, along with my colleagues Jeremy and Mai and others, because of its deep philosophical underpinnings and beauty.
