Wabi-sabi offers a refuge from the modern world's obsession with perfection, and accepts imperfections as all the more meaningful – and, in their own way, beautiful.

Wabi-sabi - a definition

It is the inevitable mortality embound in nature, however, that is key to a true understanding of wabi-sabi. As author Andrew Juniper notes in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wabi-Sabi-Japanese-Art-Impermanence/dp/0804834822">Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence </a>, “It… uses the uncompromising touch of mortality to focus the mind on the exquisite transient beauty to be found in all things impermanent”. Alone, natural patterns are merely pretty, but in understanding their context as transient items that highlight our own awareness of impermanence and death, they become profound.

Often associated with wabi-sabi is the art of kintsugi – a method of repairing broken pottery using gold or lacquer. The process highlights, rather than conceals, the cracks, allowing them to become a part of the piece, too. When his daughter accidentally broke some of his work, Hamana said, laughing, he decided to leave the pieces outside for a few years, allowing them to be coloured and shaped by nature. When it was repaired by a local kintsugi specialist, the different colours created a contrast so subtle, so uneven, that could never have been intentionally created. Embracing the effects of nature and allowing family history to be visible in a piece creates a unique value for something which would, in many cultures, simply be discarded as worthless.

 Wabi-sabi and kintsugi

The dents and scratches we bear are all reminders of experience, and to erase them would be to ignore the complexities of life. By retaining the imperfect, repairing the broken and learning to find beauty in flaws – rather than in spite of them – Japan’s ability to cope with the natural disasters it so often faces is strengthened...life is not perfect, and nor should I try to make it so.

Life is not perfect

Wabi-sabi offers a refuge from the modern world's obsession with perfection, and accepts imperfections as all the more meaningful – and, in their own way, beautiful. 

Japan’s unusual way to view the world

Christopher Lynas