Four Measures of Beauty
Where taste means knowing what not to say.
Translating a chapter takes me two full days. It’s a lot — and somehow, it’s not.
Two days to reach the version that goes out — but it’s never the final one. I’m always returning, rewriting, fine-tuning — even after publication the surface never quite settles.
Lately, those days have belonged mostly to the night. Gallery work pulled me from London to the U.S. and back, and I returned with a suitcase full of new people, shifting emotions, and a few thoughts I’m still gently untangling. (Also: I saw whales. Which, frankly, might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me.)
The jet lag, I’m handling. What I’m still learning is how to be mild with myself. I’m a creature of rituals — they shape the rhythm of my days, my seasons, my life. (I know — I’ve spoken of repetition before.) Travel unravels that fabric fast. But when I manage to hold on, even loosely, things move with more ease. The bigger decisions feel lighter. My mind clears, no longer crowded by constant choices. So I’m back to guarding my small anchors again.
In other good news, my itinerary for Japan is beginning to take form — not through guidebooks, but through the people and stories this book keeps bringing into my life. I’m deliberately skipping several of the “musts,” trusting I’ll return. This first journey will be mine.
P.S. There’s something about books that feels truest on paper — so I’ve made the chapters print-ready (you’ll find PDF below). A quiet kind of joy, imagining these pages reaching someone’s table.
— A.
Prefer reading on paper? Here’s a print-ready chapter. More about the project here.
Four Measures of Beauty
Translated from Vsevolod Ovchinnikov
In Japanese aesthetics, beauty is measured by four principles. Three of them — sabi, wabi, and shibui — trace their lineage back to the ancient religion of Shinto. The fourth — yūgen — is shaped by Buddhist philosophy. Taken individually, they begin to make sense.
The first word is sabi. In Japanese thought, beauty and naturalness are inseparable. What is unnatural cannot be beautiful. And yet, this sense of naturalness can be deepened, made more poignant, by the presence of certain qualities.
Time, the Japanese believe, reveals the essence of things. Which is why they find a special charm in the marks of age: the darkened grain of old wood, a moss-covered stone in the garden, the slight discolouration at the edge of a painting touched by many hands.
These traces of age are called sabi, a word that literally means “rust.” But sabi is not decay — it is authenticity. The weathering of time. The elegance of the archaic. The grace of imperfection, worn into being.
If sabi draws a thread between art and nature, the second word — wabi — creates a bridge between art and daily life. And here, too, the Japanese will tell you: wabi cannot really be explained. It must be felt.
Wabi is the absence of luxury, of ostentation, of the showy or overdone — all of which, in Japanese aesthetics, are synonymous with vulgarity. Wabi is the beauty of the ordinary. A wise restraint. The quiet richness of simplicity.
By cultivating an appreciation for modest things, the Japanese learn to see beauty in everything that surrounds them — not only in paintings or porcelain, but in the smallest items of everyday life. A rice paddle. A bamboo trivet. A teapot stand. Each can be an object of art and an embodiment of beauty. Practicality and the understated elegance of utility — this is wabi.
Wabi and sabi are old words. Over time, they merged into a single phrase — wabi-sabi1 — which expanded further, crystallising into a third term: shibui.
Ask a Japanese person what shibui means, and they might say: it is what someone with good taste would call beautiful. In that sense, shibui is the final judgement in any aesthetic verdict. Across centuries, the Japanese have cultivated a nearly instinctive ability to recognise — and create — that elusive quality.
The word shibui originally meant “astringent.” It comes from the name of a fruit preserve made from persimmons. But in its evolved form, shibui is more than taste — it is a feeling: the beauty of simplicity fused with the beauty of naturalness. Not just beauty in general, but beauty specific to a thing’s essence — to its purpose, and to the material from which it is made.
A dagger needs no decorative ornament. What matters is the sharpness of the blade, the strength of its temper. A teacup is well-made if it feels good to drink from and still carries the primal warmth of the clay shaped by the potter’s hands. Minimal interference. Maximum utility. That balance, for the Japanese, is the ideal.
And shibui appears in the most unexpected places. Once, I overheard two girls on the subway arguing about actors. Yves Montand, one said, had shibui — his beauty was rugged, masculine, unvarnished. Alain Delon did not. Too pretty. Among Japanese actors, Toshiro Mifune was the embodiment of shibui. Yūzō Kayama, adored by schoolgirls for his guitar songs and clean-cut charm, was not. Too slick.
You’ll find shibui in the dry bitterness of green tea, in the elusive undertone of fine perfume. It is primordial imperfection paired with sober restraint. Anything artificial, flashy, or excessive is the enemy of shibui.
In Japanese art, there’s no obvious march of style — no clean succession from one movement to the next. Continuity isn’t visible in form, but in content. Japanese aesthetics resemble a drink brewed over centuries to the same internal recipe, even as the vessel that holds it might be foreign.
Centuries ago, when art came over from China — refined, sophisticated — the Japanese borrowed only the vessel. The flavour they poured into it remained their own. And so it is with Western influences today, even the most avant-garde: for the Japanese, they are still just vessels, still filled with the same astringent essence.
At the heart of wabi, sabi, and shibui lies a way of seeing objects as animate — as soulful. A master does not treat his material like a lord commanding a servant, but like a man gazing at a woman from whom he hopes to have a child in his likeness. That view carries the echo of Shinto.
Beauty, for the Japanese, is not learned — it is inherited from nature. And from Buddhism, too, which left its own quiet imprint on the national sensibility.
To listen to what is unspoken. To gaze at what is unseen. That is the fourth measure of beauty: yūgen.
Yūgen is the art of suggestion. The charm of the unfinished. Born from a Buddhist view of impermanence, and shaped by a land always vulnerable to disaster, yūgen finds beauty in transience, in change.
Every nation grieves or rejoices at the passage of time. But few have made impermanence itself a source of beauty. The Japanese did. It is no coincidence that their national flower is the cherry blossom.
Spring arrives not with ice-breaking rivers and floods but with an explosion of bloom. Cherry blossoms don’t wither. They fall, dancing, on the breeze. Better to fall beautiful than to fade.
This celebration of change owes much to Zen. According to Zen, the truth of the Buddha cannot be taught in words. It must be grasped through intuition, through sudden insight, often sparked by nature’s shifting moods. To live in tune with the world, to find majesty in the smallest things — this is the Zen ideal.
To Zen, finality is incompatible with life. In art, there can be no resting point. Perfection is real only in passing. And so, perfection itself matters less than perfecting. Completion is less alive than becoming. What moves us most is what is left unsaid.
To hint rather than declare — this is the core principle of Japanese art. The artist leaves space, and invites the viewer to fill it. Japanese painters say, “The empty spaces on the scroll carry more meaning than the strokes of the brush.” Stage actors live by the rule: “If you want to show your feelings fully, reveal only eight-tenths of them.”
Japanese art is the art of subtext. A haiku might contain just one image, one phrase — and yet it holds an entire season, a whole world. In a single dewdrop, a poet evokes the freshness of summer morning, and something of himself. The rest, the reader brings.
Noh theatre2 stages every play against the same backdrop — a solitary pine. Every gesture is stylised, exact. And yet it reaches far beyond its form.
The highest expression of yūgen may be the Zen rock garden — a poem of stone and sand. Four centuries before abstraction reached the West, a tea master named Sōami created such a garden at Ryōan-ji Temple in Kyoto.
To the uninitiated — say, tourists from an American military base — it may look like a tennis court: a rectangle of white gravel with a scatter of fifteen rocks. But it is poetry, in the truest sense. And it explains why so many Western experiments feel belated here. You don’t need a tourist guide’s interpretation — tiger cubs crossing a river, mountain peaks above the sea of clouds. Let it speak for itself. Let the asymmetrical harmony express the universal in all things. Let the changing world speak eternity, without words.
“Westerners polish their silverware to a blinding shine. We prefer silverware that has been dulled by years of handling. The sheen of grime, the inherited residue — we elevate it to a kind of aesthetic principle.
We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a luster with a hint of shadow — something that speaks of the passage of time, of human touch, of the oil of hands, of soot and damp, of a thing softened by age and use.
In such spaces, among such objects, the soul can rest.”
— Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (1933)3
Axel Vervoordt is a legendary Belgian art dealer and designer — and probably the most devoted Western student and promoter of wabi. Here’s a flip-through his book “Wabi Inspirations”.
And a conversation with the master himself: :
Noh theatre is a centuries-old form of Japanese drama known for its stillness, stylised movement, and carved wooden masks. Each mask reflects a character type rather than a changing emotion — old men (Okina), noble elders (Jō), women (Onna-men), men (Otoko-men), demons (Kishin), and spirits of the dead (Onryō). The expressions are fixed, but shift with light and movement.
A short essay written in 1933, in a kind of a casual newspaper column format, memorialising the world of traditional Japan in the moment that Tokyo is becoming modernised. Tanizaki says that the world feels big and confusing and loud and too bright, and he wants to retreat, to move to an older sensibility, and I find it really appealing.
Thanks for this little introduction to the concepts, really beautifully put!
I took a little wander sideways this morning into those categories we tick and then overlook, pulled down by the verticality of the Notes default feed. In Aesthetics I initially travelled down, then across the posts listed at the top, saving yours to read. And what a treat it is, thank you. To say I’m familiar with these concepts would be an imposition, but I have been curious and read a little about them as water and place pull me ever closer, and I lose myself in the small beauty of the ordinary. And I shall return to read this chapter again, and begin a journey backwards and forwards through your posts. I’m glad that your trip will be your own Alexandra, it will be richer for it.