precept in Japanese design since the Zen tea masters of the 16th century who circumscribed the rituals of chanoyu. One master, the author of ‘Zen-cha Roku’, wrote: ‘Wabi means lacking things, having things run entirely contrary to our desires, being frustrated in our wishes.’15 Koshiro quotes further from this text, in which Roku elaborates: ‘Wabi involves not regarding incapacities as incapacitating, not feeling that lacking something is deprivation, not thinking that what is not provided is deficiency.’ From this, Koshiro surmises that: ‘Wabi means to transform material insufficiency so that one discovers in it a world of spiritual freedom unbounded by material things.’16 As such, the makeshift is elevated from a context of a temporary making-do to a ‘richness of spirit, a nobility, and purity within what may appear to be a rough exterior’. Over time, not only were things that were lacking perceived as being wabi, but also ‘a preference for warped and irregular forms developed’.17 The teachings of Rikyu in the sacred text ‘Samporoku’ record the attitudinal shift that is necessary to follow the way of tea: ‘It is sufficient if the dwelling one uses does not leak water and the food served suffices to stave off hunger.’18 Thus, makeshift epitomises the prerequisites of a tea ceremony. American artist, architect and author Leonard Koren published a modest book on wabi-sabi in 1994, in which he admitted: ‘Wabi-sabi resolved my artistic dilemma about how to create beautiful things without getting caught up in the dispiriting materialism that usually surrounds such creative acts … wabi-sabi appeared the perfect antidote to the pervasively slick, saccharine, corporate style of beauty that I felt was desensitising American society.’19 In the last chapter, Koren ascribes the material qualities of wabi-sabi: the suggestion of natural process; irregular; intimate; unpretentious; earthy; murky and simple. He then attempts to locate contemporary examples of the wabi aesthetic: a sweater by Comme des Garçons from 1982–3,
Left: ‘Spare’ pile of gravel incorporated as part of a Japanese dry landscape garden, Kyoto. Top right: Preparation of futons for guests to sleep on in the room where a Japanese tea ceremony took place earlier. Bottom right: Sukiya-style wall and window detail in simply worked materials, demonstrating the humble wabi-sabi aesthetic.
‘supposedly created by programming the loom to create a fabric with randomly placed holes’,20 and an expanded metal chair by Shiro Kuramata called ‘How High the Moon’ (1986), which Koren thinks is ‘a good example of the fusion of modernism (the industrial process, precision execution, geometric forms) and wabi-sabi (sense of nothingness and non-materiality, murky colour, subordinate importance of utility).’21 Koren’s notes reveal a critique of modern production methods and the qualities of finish they favour: ‘Things in process, like buildings under construction, are often more imagistic than the finished thing itself. Poetic irregularity and variability are difficult to mass produce however.’22 Nevertheless, he is concerned to find ways of prescribing material qualities such as ‘grainy, tangled, wispy, wrinkled, and the like’. Koren refers to a Japanese art movement dating from the late 1960s/early 1970s called mono-ha, or school of things. Toshiaka Minemura defines their intent as being ‘to bring out some artistic language from "things" as they stood, bare and undisguised, by letting them appear on the stage of artistic expression, no longer as mere materials, but allowing them a leading part’.23 Minemura attributes the emergence of this school of thought to several factors, including ‘an ambivalent feeling of both fascination and repulsion towards the products of our industrialized society’.24 The work of Mono-ha artists might include using a material in a way that foregrounds its transformative potential: Narita simply made charcoal from wood, so that ‘the subject was the “qualitative metamorphosis of an object of the same genus"’.25 Interestingly, Minemura contextualises the impact of mono-ha as being makeshift in its own right: ‘If one looks at the Mono-has with synchronic eyes and sees in them only a transient group phenomenon, one may regard them as … air pockets, rather similar to the violence of war, [which] while ruining plenty of things history has built up, or was about to build up, modify 83