(light jazz music)
- [Steven] We're on the second floor
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in the galleries devoted to the arts of Japan.
And we're looking at a small ceramic bowl,
and it's so unexpected for me.
When I think about the ceramics of Japan, of China,
of Korea, I think about impossibly thin-walled,
beautiful examples of porcelain, perfect geometries.
This is anything but.
- [Sonia] We're looking at an early 17th century Oribe bowl.
It is very irregular in its shape.
The rim is undulating, the roundness is distorted
in various ways.
And we see various motifs on its surface
as well as inside the bowl.
- [Steven] This is a hard piece of ceramic.
If we dropped it on the floor, it would break.
But it feels organic.
It feels as if it's still pliable,
as if it's still in the process of being formed.
- [Sonia] It preserves the ways in which the potters
manipulated its material.
While the bowl was still malleable,
the potter would have distorted the perfect shape
of a regular round bowl and created these indentations.
- [Steven] And so the willing and active deformation
of perfect forms.
- [Sonia] The shape is known as a clog shape,
a reference to the aesthetic principle dominant
in the early 17th century called wabi.
Wabi refers to the simple and the austere.
It refers to something that is beautiful
without artifice, something artlessly beautiful.
- [Steven] In some ways, it's a lie,
because this bowl was once perfect.
So the lack of artifice has been layered over the artifice
creating a kind of hierarchy
where this notion of wabi is paradoxically
even more refined than the refined bowl
from which this came.
- [Sonia] Exactly.
The beauty of the bowl it derives from playfully knowing
that the artifice that created the bowl
has the effect of beauty without artifice.
- [Steven] And this paradox would have been
especially apparent in the early 17th century
when this bowl was made,
because this would have been seen in opposition
to highly refined objects that would traditionally
have been used for the tea ceremony.
And so when objects like this were introduced
into the tea ceremony, it was really revolutionary.
- [Sonia] Oribe ware created a revolution
in Japanese ceramics.
The name Oribe comes from Furuta Oribe,
a warlord and a tea master in late 16th century Japan.
- [Steven] So it may be unexpected that a warlord
could also be associated with the tea ceremony,
but this was exactly the case.
- [Sonia] Inside the bowl, we see a stylized form
of a flower as well as a plum blossom.
- [Steven] And the plum blossom has literary references
and can specifically denote the idea of the ephemeral,
a plum blossom, this perfectly beautiful thing
that lasts only a moment.
- [Sonia] For the user of this bowl, who would have seen
these motifs up close, these plum blossoms would have had
all kinds of allusions to classical Japanese poetry.
In combination with the geometric patterns
that would have created a very pleasant visual contrast,
the one that paralleled an array of poetical illusions,
all for the enjoyment of the participant in a tea ceremony.
- [Steven] It's extraordinary to look at in its complexity,
its imperfection, it's almost brutalized surface,
but I think that that would be enhanced even more
if I was holding it in my hand.
I can imagine feeling a contrast between the smooth surface
of the glaze and the rough quality of the clay underneath.
- [Sonia] Wabi can be considered integral
to a larger concept called sabi.
Sabi in Japanese may refer to the verb sabu, to wither,
but it can also refer to the adjective sabishii,
which means lonely.
So sabi is something austere, something isolated.
- [Steven] And so maybe it's appropriate,
the way that the Metropolitan Museum of Art
has placed this bowl by itself on a shelf,
alone, austere and beautiful in its imperfection.
- [Sonia] When you hold a bowl like this and rotate it,
it is different bowls, different aesthetics solutions
all embedded into this one very rich object.
(light jazz music)