Wabi sabi, is a philosophy of life, and once you accept it, everything trickles down to it. I don’t make a special effort to bring it to my practice, but if you look at my spaces, you see that element of finished and unfinished. It is a tightrope you are walking, but you have to maintain that. Thus, asymmetry and asperity play a major role in my practice. I appreciate spaces that incorporate natural objects and processes and I try to maintain this principle in my own practice. Nothing is permanent, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect.
‘Wabi’ originally referred to the loneliness of living in nature, remote from society; ‘sabi’ meant “chill”, “lean” or “withered”. Around 700 years ago, particularly among the Japanese nobility, understanding emptiness and imperfection was honored as tantamount to the first step to satori, or enlightenment. In today’s Japan, the meaning of wabi-sabi is often condensed to “wisdom in natural simplicity”. In art books, it is typically defined as “flawed beauty”.
