Get rid of all that is unnecessary. Wabi-sabi means treading lightly on the planet and knowing how to appreciate whatever is encountered, no matter how trifling, whenever it is encountered. "Material poverty, spiritual richness" are wabi-sabi bywords. In other words, wabi-sabi tells us to stop our preoccupation with success — wealth, status, power and luxury — and enjoy the unencumbered life.
Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things.
"Greatness" exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details. Wabi-sabi represents the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular and enduring. Wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes.
Things wabi-sabi are unpretentious, unstudied and inevitable looking. They do not blare out "I am important" or demand to be the centre of attention. They are understated and unassuming, yet not without presence or quiet authority. Things wabi-sabi easily coexist with the rest of their environment.
Things wabi-sabi are appreciated only during direct contact and use; they are never locked away in a museum. Things wabi-sabi have no need for the reassurance of status or the validation of market culture. They have no need for documentation of provenance.
Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize. (Things wabi-sabi are emotionally warm, never cold.)
By Leonard Coren
A roundup of the basic concepts:
| The bowl is hollow, open and free shaped | antithesis | The box is rectilinear, precise and contained |
| Simple and sparing (It's what you leave out that counts) | antithesis | Cluttered and full |
| Non demanding beauty | antithesis | Quintessential supreme rule to aesthetics |
| Non utility, non-purpose, sustaining empty meaning | antithesis | Survival of function and utility to uses |
| Solicits into sensory expansion of possibilities | antithesis | Desolate sensory with excessive definition |
| Comforts uncertainly & unconventionality | antithesis | Intolerant with ambiguity or contradictions, requires strong definitions in order to withhold substance |
| Seemingly Crude (Primordial and natural materials) | antithesis | Ostensibly slick (New artificial manufactured materials) |
| Earthy, Intimate and warm | antithesis | Sterile and hygienic |
| Unpretentious and obscured | antithesis | Pretentious, ornate, gaudy & flashy |
| To everything there is a season to change | antithesis | Strained for everlasting |
| Favors degradation and attrition (Free to change) | antithesis | Requires maintenance and excessive attention |
| Diminish to evolve to nothing (Dissolved) | antithesis | Requires restoration, fixing and reviving |
| Revives naturally through change in time | antithesis | Revamp/replace or change in pace to exhaustive trends |
| Weathering/contamination generates rich expression | antithesis | Purity is divine, decay is weak |
| Imperfect and incomplete | antithesis | Strains improvement and perfectionism |
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