The Cult of Wabi Sabi

Exploring the *Experientiality of Sensation
in the Aesthetics of Age, Utility and Beauty

The image above, the entry to the Fukuju Sake Brewery in Kobé, Japan, was taken during a GIRVIN project mission. It’s a mix of fire-seared timber, rough-chiseled granite and aggregate flooring.

When I was younger, I had a proclivity for rust. That remains to this day.
I like walking on rough pathways, more than smooth roadways.

I like floors that are worn-down, of distressed materiality
and made of gathered, conglomerate and aggregated finishes.

I admire sand-blasted things.

I love old buildings with battered walls, tilting doorways, cracked concrete and imperfect fits. It is more real, somehow, that way.

I like old tools, old wooden handles, oak barrels, galvanized buckets, and aged, beaten metals, the feel of rough-sawn timber, and iron-cleaved stone. I savored the ghostly: old signage, distressed bricks, buzzed aluminum and salt-bit-steel; I loved weather-beaten barns—and everything inside them.

Rough asphalt, green-struck, root-cracked
and imperfect streets and roads; yes, love them.
And open my eyes to these characteristics every day.

Why is it that we’re fascinated by the dissolute?

Why would you think? You might dislike the weathered, imperfect and distressed.

Or:
is it an interest of any kind—collecting antiques,
the pleasure of ruins:
savoring old things,
visiting abandoned sites?

There is an entire Japanese aesthetic that suggests: “nothing is forever, nothing is ever finished, and nothing is perfect.” Wabi-sabi admires the lonely, the abandoned, imperfection and transitory, those objects that, in Western tradition might be described as those “left-out-in-the-rain” and, to some Western sentiments, damaged and ruined.

More specifically—the legacy of wabi-sabi tied to two precepts of beauty—those objects mellowed by age,
and objects of rustic utility.

That, sabi, could be translated as: in the loneliness of solitary meditation and presence in the things that surround us—simpler is better, there is a lean perfection in no perfection, as all things are transitory—in the journey of living, no-thing will ever be completed, nothing is finished, it’s in transit to the no-thingness of perfection.

An example, historically, would be this essay notation:
“In all things, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth.”
Essays in Idleness (Tsuzuregusa) by Yoshida Kenkō (14th Century)

And wabi has the character of design—it lies in the tools and objects that function, simply and beautifully, in their sensed expressions of rusticity.
That’s the handmade hammer.
The semi-toothed saw.
The battered maul
and the rusted awl.

There are some attractive writings, as Western interpretations, that can be enlightening to review, if you’re unfamiliar with the highlights of Asian aesthetic ideals.

Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man” captures a cold, stark winter landscape and a state of solitary meditation where the observer dissolves into the scene’s emptiness. The famous closing lines—
“nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.”
—reflect an ultimate stripping away of the ego and a radical
acceptance of stillness and bare reality.

According to Leonard Koren, [Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers.] wabi-sabi can be defined as “the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of traditional Japanese beauty and it occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West.”

And according to Andrew Juniper, [Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence.] he notes that “If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi.”

For Richard Powell, [Wabi Sabi Simple.] “Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.“

Wikipedia notes, “The words wabi and sabi do not translate easily. Wabi originally referred to the loneliness of living in nature, remote from society; sabi meant “chill”, “lean” or “withered”. Around the 14th century these meanings began to change, taking on more positive connotations. Wabi now connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object. Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.

Working in the wet and storm-cast woods, I find it fascinating to study sites of domestic and industrial abandonments.
I’ve done that all over the world.

Mining outfits, quarry shafts, lumber camps and mills,
factories of countless types.
So above then, an abandoned lumber site,
Western Washington.

I walk this looking for material presence, a meditation on dissolution, things done and gone — to another form.
They’re still valuable; they’re just different.

Touch as you go.
Sense as you stride.
Scent as you stroll.

What comes of it?

Look down to what you’re walking on.
Look to what’s above.
Touch as you go.

Tools that were. Are. They. Still. Work.

Buildings that were.
Are.

There is beauty in the dissolvent.

Moss and iron.

The bridge still works—you can walk it, with new implants.

Toggles: tooled in rust.

Moss in contrast.

Sabi:
textured.

Perfected imperfection.

It’s been suggested, that for children, taking them to abandoned factories could be as powerful as a meaningful learning experience as a transitory contemplation.

You might note other experiences and excursions you’ve personally taken — what could you share? Turns out, you’re not alone. And of course, there is a topic, ruin-porn, for those that relish the deeper exposure to the dissolution of places once made.

And the USNational Park System has
a whole set of locations for Ruin Exploration.

T R A V E L
Travel & Look back, industrial tourism?

National Heritage Areas | The National Park Service

“We’re finding a hunger,” says Michael Boettcher, an urban planner and industrial-history buff. “Everyone has been to Disney World, and it’s like, what else you got?”

In Japan, it’s popular to take nighttime boat cruises past glittering industrial superstructures. In Germany’s Ruhr industrial powerhouse region, bicyclists meander a landscape that has turned recreational. And in Canada, 1920s wooden grain elevators, dubbed the Five Prairie Giants, draw sightseers to the Manitoba plains.

The appeal? “It gives you a sense of where we’ve been and how that has made us who we are,” Boettcher says.

San Pietro, Italia, 2017 Photograph by Girvin

Industrial structures are being reimagined as art galleries, event spaces, museums and parks. They’re also being preserved as tourism sites that highlight early manufacturing. Here are some to consider.

You might wonder, what’s the threading between the opening wabi-sabi discussion and American factories?

What I offer is that the whole premise of elegant restraint, subtle understatement, mellowing of objects in age and rustic utility are esoteric Asian disciplines of aesthetic thinking.
How could that be applied elsewhere?
Just look and seek what you can find.

Tim | GIRVIN+OSEANStudios
Queen Anne & Copalis Beach
––––
Rethinking Beauty:
Brand Strategy & Visualization
Girvin BrandJourneys

*Think of experientiality as a state of holistic experience.
Experiential is a patterned word, founded on the same premise as “inferential.”
Experientiality, while it might be presumed by some as a fabrication by GIRVIN, is a studied condition.