Maeda's SIMPLICITY

The Un-Modernism of Nature

Every flaw is its beauty.

Our print drive for Asian relief is going well in dimensions that I did not foresee. We received a pledge from an old friend Tomoko Sakomura who I think might just be finishing her PhD at Columbia University now in Asian Art History. It was Tomoko's mother, Hiroko Sakomura, that introduced me to two very unique people—Ikko Tanaka (the "father" of modern Japanese graphic design) and Paul Rand (the "father" of modern American graphic design). Of course there were many intellectual "parents" in the process of giving birth to modern graphic design, but Tanaka and Rand's genes are certainly the most dominant ones.

I attended a private tea party at Tanaka's home in Tokyo together with Hiroko and the architect Shigeru Ban around 1995. The words "tea party" conjure up an image of finely woven doilies and petit fours (yum!), but Japanese tea party is something much more sublime. Tanaka had been a practicing student of the tea ceremony and we were his test subjects (it's hard to imagine someone so masterful still being a student in his 70's).

The ceremony began, as is customary in some styles of chanoyu, with an examination of the tea-making implements. We passed around tea "cups" (more like deep bowls) to admire. If I remember correctly, I was assigned the cup from the 17th century that looked something like a Klingon weapon of some sort. It was kind of like a bowl that was thrown around in the kiln, mashed, and re-dripped back into form. And it was not clear where I would place my lips to the bowl.

There I was at the house of one of the Masters of Modernism sipping from something completely imperfect, of non-platonic geometry (no cylinders, spheres, cubes to be found), and lacked all recognizable semantics of a cup. Yet from that cup I drank, and drank well. The cup symbolized to me, the essence of Japanese aesthetics which strives for a kind of perfection. But as a direct contradiction to 'perfection' as we know it—”smooth, white, simple surfaces"—and instead a seemingly exact opposite as embodied by the perfection of imperfection. Is it not natural to be imperfect in a perfect way?

In mathematics we know that positive infinity wraps around to negative infinity. This cup to me, was that point where the two infinities meet—a point rarely unseen. It was quite a privilege. And for that reason each cup I acquire in my collection of ceramics needs to be more irregular and flawed than the last, in that perfect-imperfect way. This little routine of mine is the special ritual that brings me closer to nature (through a synthetic experience) in the techno-land of MIT.

Posted by maeda at January 11, 2005 12:55 PM