Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers | 
 enlarge | Author: Leonard Koren
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 31395
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 96
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.5
ISBN: 1880656124
Dewey Decimal Number: 111.850952
EAN: 9781880656129
ASIN: 1880656124
Publication Date: July 1, 1994
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Condition: Legendary independent bookstore online since 1994. Reliable customer service and no-hassle return policy.
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Product Description
From the Introduction
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of things unconventional.
The immediate catalyst for this book was a widely publicized tea event in Japan. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi has long been associated with the tea ceremony, and this event promised to be a profound wabi-sabi experience. Hiroshi Teshigahara, the hereditary iemoto (grand master) of the Sogetsu school of flower arranging, had commissioned three of Japan's most famous and fashionable architects to design and build their conceptions of ceremonial tea-drinking environments. Teshigahara in addition would provide a fourth design. After a three-plus-hour train and bus ride from my office in Tokyo, I arrived at the event site, the grounds of an old imperial summer residence. To my dismay I found a celebration of gorgeousness, grandeur, and elegant play, but hardly a trace of wabi-sabi. One slick tea hut, ostensibly made of paper, looked and smelled like a big white plastic umbrella. Adjacent was a structure made of glass, steel, and wood that had all the intimacy of a highrise office building. The one tea house that approached the wabi-sabi qualities I had anticipated, upon closer inspection, was fussed up with gratuitous post- modern appendages. It suddenly dawned on me that wabi-sabi, once the preeminent high-culture Japanese aesthetic and the acknowledged centerpiece of tea, was becoming-had become?-an endangered species.
Admittedly, the beauty of wabi-sabi is not to everyone's liking. But I believe it is in everyone's interest to prevent wabi-sabi from disappearing altogether. Diversity of the cultural ecology is a desirable state of affairs, especially in opposition to the accelerating trend toward the uniform digitalization of all sensory experience, wherein an electronic "reader" stands between experience and observation, and all manifestation is encoded identically.
In Japan, however, unlike Europe and to a lesser extent America, precious little material culture has been saved. So in Japan, saving a universe of beauty from extinction means, at this late date, not merely preserving particul
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 delightful read for anyone interested in aesthetics or design August 19, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
a close friend of mine loaned me the book on saturday - i read it once on sunday, and again yesterday (monday)
the book is more powerful than i can describe in a review. 5-stars, no-brainer.. read this book!
the orientation is more ideological than demonstrative or critical.. the relative shortage of (delightful!) examples leaves me wanting more. and as much as like loved this book, i would like to read the large glossy version titled "wabi-sabi: for people with ipods, large televisions, and who generally disdain reading" :)
in its existing form, the book is an easy and inspiring read. if you're intrigued by the beauty of a pair of worn-out shoes, the grime of a subway station, the cracks in a crumbling rock, a decaying leaf, etc.. this book may give words, insight and extension to your aesthetic perception. given the relative lack of high-fidelity examples, it may be hard for others to gain an appreciation of wabi-sabi through this book
wabi-sabi is primarily contrasted with modernism, providing a much more useful and forward-focused comparison than against its more classical/baroque aesthetic ancestors - however the comparison does imply an inappropriate (imo) us-vs-them context with modernism. modernism is concerned with the clean, permanent, undistracting, impersonal, etc.. wabi-sabi is about the dirty, organic, distracting and personal. the author positions wabi-sabi as occupying a subset of aesthetics that is *not* modern.. i don't know if this "anti" element is a crucial part of wabi-sabi (?). wabi-sabi would be more powerful to me if it were described only in terms of its own fundamental traits, without counter-reference to other aesthetic ideologies. i find my ipod attractive *and* i find decaying leaves attractive - is it possible there could be more one "good" aesthetic?! the author generally defines wabi-sabi as fundamentally antithetical to modern design aesthetics. for example, on page 9 he writes:
"wabi-sabi - deep, multi-dimensional, elusive - appeared the perfect antidote to the pervasively slick, saccharine, corporate style of beauty that i felt was desensitizing american society. i have since come to believe that wabi-sabi is related to many of the more emphatic anti-aesthetics that invariably spring from the young, modern, creative soul: beat, punk, grunge, or whatever it's called next"
otherwise, i don't know anything about zen buddhism - and the book left me wanting to know more
 A little disappointed June 4, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
It was not as good as I expected. I would not pay full price for it again, in fact, it did not stay in my collection but was bought by a used bookstore. If you are interested in a philosophical or spiritual aspect of art or writing, look elsewhere. While it is a lovely looking book, the information could have been found online for free. I would have been happier with a small book of Haiku.
Articulates the essence May 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book has been very important for me in its ability to explain something that is hardly explainable - more to suggest the essence of Wabi Sabi and let the reader take it the rest of the way. Particularly in the second half of this slender book does the nature of Wabi Sabi come to life. It is a book I will continue to read on occasion, and it sits next to my Tao te Ching ready to be accessed at any time.
 Wabi-Sabi 101 March 29, 2008
A good introduction to the history and basic concepts of Wabi-Sabi. It has good examples that are relevant to our culture and lifestyle. I wish it had better photos. But overall I recommend it.
easy read with beautiful design March 25, 2008
This was a great intro to the ideas of wabi sabi. the use of modern art as a reference point is a very constructive way to describe "what is" and "what is not" wabi sabi. I definitely recommend this book for any artist or creative mind.
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