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$418
EPOCH · 2023
- Cg2
- Fr
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Embracing My Demons
Wabi-Sabi is the ghost note, the flawed interior kept as a condition, with nothing in it to purge.
Wabi-Sabi
The Tender Ruin
A WORD ENGLISH NEVER MADE · READ THE CUSTOMS HOUSE
EXTREME
RARE
RARE · Rare-Liminal
Japanese. Beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. The crack, the weathering, the asymmetry, valued as the thing itself and never as the flaw in it.
The word
Japanese, two ideas fused: wabi, the beauty of the spare and imperfect, and sabi, the beauty that time deposits. Zen aesthetics and the tea ceremony refined it for centuries; kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold, is its clearest argument.
The feeling
Relief, first. The demand for perfection drops away and the cracked, the faded and the asymmetrical stop being tolerated and start being preferred, because they are honest about time. It is a quiet feeling with a long half-life, closer to trust than to pleasure.
Against its neighbours
Perfection asks how close a thing comes to its ideal; wabi-sabi asks what time has done with it, and calls the answer the point. Mono no aware aches at impermanence in the moment of noticing; wabi-sabi goes further, and finds the impermanence beautiful in itself.
In the work
Damage rendered with affection. Surface treated as history rather than error.
1 work composed with Wabi-Sabi
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