Main content
Course: Art of Asia > Unit 4
Lesson 10: Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573–1615)Oribe tea bowl
Clog-Shaped Tea Bowl (Chawan) with Plum Blossoms and Geometric Patterns, early 17th century, Japan, stoneware with iron-black glaze, Mino ware, Black Oribe type, 7.6 x 14.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
speakers: Dr. Sonia Coman and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Smarthistory.
Video 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)