Wabi: understated beauty found in the art of Japanese Tea Ceremony Jack Arians

I found the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi to be incredibly moving. Best shown in throught the means of Tea Ceremony, the concept of wabi is a way of seeing beauty in the mundane. Utensils are good according to wabi if they are used and worn, the focus is intentionally drawn away from the traditional aesthetic focus of being ostensively perfect, and into a new focus on the use or function of everything involved in the ceremony. 

I found that japanese Haiku is also a great example of this idea of wabi. One poem in particular by Koboyashi Issa, is a great example. Roughly translated from Japanese, the poem reads:

What a strange feeling

To be alive

Beneath cherry blossoms

    I believe this view of Beauty brings forth the often overlooked aspects of life. These parts of life function just as importantly as things we traditionally view as 'beautiful' because these seemingly mundane moments are what give those beautiful moments their distinction as being beautfiul. This purpose of the mundane aspects of life give those aspects a more profound and deeper meaning, which can be said to be beautiful in and of itself.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-aesthetics/#WabiSimpAustBeau

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Does an Artist Capture? - Jacob Hamilton

  What does the artist capture in his artwork? This question has  emerged  in class on multiple occasions. If  a painter paints an image of  a  chair, what is captured in that  image? One might naively respond that the artist has captured the chair . This answer implies that the artist has tried through his art to produce a duplicate of a chair. If this is the artist’s end, then the artist  is in pursuit  of a frivolous end. To recreate or reproduce a chair via the medium of painting will only produce  a highly deficient chair. One cannot  sit on a chair that has been painted  and it  is  therefore  a very bad  chair.  Therefore, it is  highly  dubious to  maintain  that the artist’s job is to produce duplicates of things .    T he question   remain s , w hen an artist paints a chair ,  what is he trying to capture?   When we engage with objects in the world,...
Read more

Pilgrimage - Julia Allen

 I had for so long in my life misunderstood the true meaning of a pilgrim, and I loved how the reading and discussion in class re-framed what a pilgrim is. Someone who is focused on the experience of their journey rather than an end goal is the broadest definition of pilgrim that I can take away from this. I had only thought of pilgrims as either religious pilgrims or the image of the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but what a pilgrim really is is someone on a spiritual journey of some kind. In class, we discussed Chris McCandless was a pilgrim going on a journey that people really misunderstood. He separated himself from society and left to find himself, and people struggle to understand actions like this that they see as reckless or dangerous. Pilgrims are liminal, the cease to be productive in society and remove themselves from it in order to connect with nature/god, and in a productivity focused society like ours it is hard to appreciate these people and their pursuit of higher self...
Read more

The Movie Chef - Nikola Kalapasev

Chef is probably one of my favorite movies of all time, and not because of the screenplay or writing, because I've found so many similarities in myself and the characters that it almost seems like this could have been an alternate version to the life I live today. Chef follows the story of a guy named carl casper, who is a hard working head chef at a nice restaurant who is divorced and has a son. [Spoilers ahead] The movie then transitions into a more melancholy state, where chef Casper has just been fired from his job as head chef after getting into a dispute with well known food critic. Chef Casper then goes into a depression, but during this time he doesn't lose his passion for his craft of cooking wonderfully delicious and aesthetically pleasing food. The turning point is when Caspers' son tries a cubano sandwich and tells his dad that it was one of the best sandwiches he's ever had. The movie then springs into an upward march, where chef Casper begins an expedition...
Read more