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" It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe.
Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects.
If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline.
It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects.
The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms.
Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used.
When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth.
Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use.
The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty.
Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride.
Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time.
The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty.
Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it.
As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate.
The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West.
Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art.
No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan.
Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ).
The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ).
Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment.
The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking. "
― Soetsu Yanagi , The Beauty of Everyday Things
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" To put it in somewhat contradictory terms, true tea existed only before the advent of the tea ceremony. After the coming of tea, when deformation came to be consciously sought, common everyday beauty disappeared and unnatural manipulation began. This meant the demise of the beauty of tea.
Every country, according to its historical and geographical conditions, has its own peculiar character. India is characterized by intellect, China by ready action and Japan by aesthetic perception - the three splendors of the East. Indians are adept at thinking, Chinese at acting and Japanese at appreciating art. In Europe, France is close to Japan, Judaism to China and Germany to India. In Germany, however, the intellect tends to be philosophical rather than religious.
While there may be many intrinsic contradictions, I still think that there is probably no country like Japan whose people live in surroundings composed of specially chosen objects. Behind it all is undoubtedly some sort of educated taste or standard of beauty.
In Korea, the number of monochrome pieces in white or black glaze is stupendous. there are no intricate designs featuring a multitude of colors. the same is true for Korean textiles, which are undyed. Everyone wears white clothing. "
― Soetsu Yanagi , The Beauty of Everyday Things
