About this video
Two art historians look closely at an early 17th-century Oribe tea bowl at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They explain how the potter deliberately distorted a perfect form to express wabi, the beauty of the simple and austere, and how the bowl's motifs and its link to sabi enriched the tea ceremony.
You'll be able to
- describe how the Oribe bowl differs from the thin, perfect porcelain often associated with East Asian ceramics.
- explain the aesthetic ideas of wabi and sabi and the paradox of 'artless' beauty that is carefully made.
- connect the bowl's shape and motifs to its use in the Japanese tea ceremony.
Key words
- Oribe ware
- A style of Japanese ceramics named after Furuta Oribe, a warlord and tea master, known for irregular shapes and bold decoration.
- wabi
- A Japanese aesthetic principle valuing the simple and austere, beauty that seems to have no artifice.
- sabi
- A related Japanese concept linked to withering and loneliness, suggesting something austere and isolated.
- artifice
- Clever or deliberate skill used to make something, especially to create an effect.
- ephemeral
- Lasting only a very short time.
- tea ceremony
- A Japanese ritual of preparing and serving tea in which the objects used are carefully appreciated.
Transcript
(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)
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