Japanese Kintsugi Art (Golden Repair)
Wabi-sabi philosophy isn’t just about accepting imperfection—it’s about truly embracing it. What’s the difference?
“Imperfection isn’t just something to be tolerated; it’s an inherent part of life that we should teach ourselves to not only accept but even to celebrate! A wabi-sabi point of view encourages us to treat flaws as a beautiful part of the whole—a natural part of life—and to even bring them to the forefront as potential strengths rather than weaknesses.
For example, when a piece of pottery gets cracked in Japan there’s a lovely process called kintsugi, literally meaning “golden repair”, where the crack is fixed with a gold-painted glue. Instead of trying to hide the imperfection, the repair is made more obvious with a gold seam running through the pottery. In the same way, wabi-sabi teaches us to reconsider what we generally might consider an imperfection that we want to disguise, and to instead embrace it as the thing that makes an object, an experience, or ourselves original. Things like an old dining table with wine-stained wood, laugh-lines around our mouths, or a hand-woven sweater with irregular stitches.”
