Part 1: Yanagi Sōetsu and Mingei
Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961) was a Japanese philosopher who pioneered the influential aesthetic concept and artistic movement known as Mingei, “folk craft.” Beginning in the 1920s, Yanagi began to champion the beauty of common, utilitarian art. The Mingei style stands in contrast to both fine art—art for art’s sake, where the artist’s reputation inheres in the work—and the mass-produced commodities of industrial production that increasingly predominated. The paradigmatic Mingei objects were practical, produced in quantity, and therefore necessarily affordable, but handmade by skilled craftsmen who labored unselfconsciously and in cooperation. Ceramics were central to Yanagi’s analysis—there is perhaps no better example of Mingei than functional pottery—and Yanagi worked closely with noted ceramic artists Hamada Shoji and Kawai Kanjiro in developing and promoting the Mingei aesthetic.
Mingei has had enduring relevance in 20th century Japanese art, drawing comparisons to the British Arts and Crafts movement and Yanagi to William Morris. And it does seem to highlight something commonly associated with Japan’s artistic culture in its emphasis on handcraft. Perhaps the Mingei style is not so much an aesthetic project, rather an image of a bygone era of Japan, a way of life threatened by the forces unleashed after the Meiji Restoration.
The unexpected reality is that Mingei was not formulated primarily in Japan, in response to Japanese art, but in occupied Korea, with Korean pottery as the prime exemplar.
Yanagi’s education and early work as an art critic was western-oriented, studying the Post-Impressionists, writing in response to Western critics such as Frank Rutter and Roger Fry, and hosting the sculpture of Rodin in Tokyo. He came, it would seem, to eastern art by way of Korean, when Asakawa Noritaka gave him a gift of Joseon pottery in 1914. Since the early 1910s, the brothers Asakawa Noritaka and Takumi had undertaken the study of Joseon dynasty pottery, a subject that had seen little interest in Japan. This would prove a pivotal moment in Yanagi’s career and precipitate a concerted engagement with Korean pottery and culture more generally over the coming decades.
Beginning in 1916, Yanagi made frequent trips to Korea, with the Asakawa brothers as his guide. The first articulation of what would become Mingei can be seen in his publication in 1921 of Tojiki no bi (Love of Pottery), his first book on folk art, which dealt extensively with Joseon pottery. In 1924, in collaboration with the Asakawa brothers, the Joseon Folk Art Museum was founded in Seoul, more than a decade prior to the establishment of the Japanese equivalent in Tokyo, in 1936.
In Joseon ceramics Yanagi saw something of the Korean people as a whole distilled into an essential beauty—hiai no bi, the “beauty of sadness” or “beauty of sorrow.” This tragic image of the Korean people has been rightly criticized as overly sentimental and essentialist, but it does give us a sense of Yanagi’s sympathy for Korean people and culture under Japanese colonial rule. There was a political dimension to his writing on Korea over the course of the 1920s. His 1919 article “Chōsenjin o omou” (“think of the Koreans”) was published to commemorate the March First Movement, an episode of protest against Japanese occupation. He brought Joseon crafts to exhibit in Japan in a period where colonial military rule aimed to suppress Korean culture. He expressed outrage and dismay at the massacre of ethnic Koreans in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. While Yanagi clearly opposed Japan's military rule of Korea and policies of cultural repression, he maintained that—very much in line with mandatory policies of the Western nations in the interwar period—Japan could shepherd the Korean people through enlightened, liberal rule. This view of a world of more or less developed nations, bearing certain essential characteristics, marked his aesthetic philosophy as well.
The “beauty of sadness” appeared, for Yanagi, in Korean pottery as the repeated motif of a “thin and beautiful line” and the predominance of the “mournful” color white. In contrast, Chinese ceramics displayed a characteristic strength, while colorful Japanese pottery evinced a “cheerfulness.” As Yanagi’s theory matured and he began to delineate between works of the Joseon and Goryeo dynasties, the “beauty of sadness” receded in favor of a “naturalness” representative of Joseon ceramics specifically. In the 1930s, Kikuchi Yuko explains:
Yanagi's aesthetic of beauty developed terms used for the appreciation of ordinary household crafts - moving from 'naturalness' (shizensa) to 'anonymity' (mumei), 'functionality' (jitstuyō), and 'health' (kenkō) to explain the essence of Chosŏn [Joseon] ceramics.
These criteria are plainly the criteria of beauty that would become formalized as Mingei later on.
Even in his later writings, Joseon pottery still forms the basis of all comparison. In a discussion of the beauty of asymmetry and irregularity, Yanagi compares various attempts in Japanese thought (including that of Okakura Kakuzo) to explain the beauty of the imperfect. He writes that the “old Tea masters” possessed “a certain love of roughness. . . behind which lurks a hidden beauty, to which we refer in our peculiar adjectives shibui, wabi, and sabi” and that they “found depth in this naturalness.” (“The Beauty of Irregularity,” 1954). Here we find celebrated categories of Japanese aesthetics (“shibui, wabi, and sabi”) in parallel with the concept of “naturalness” that emerged in his early engagement with Joseon craft.
At the level of practice—that is, at the level of the production of ceramics—the comparison is even more stark. The famed Japanese Raku pottery was merely a bad imitation of Korean Ido ware:
The irregularity apparent in both is in fact quite different. . . . The difference is between things born and things made. . . . The Raku bowls were made with deliberate effort, the Korean bowls were effortless products of daily living and were not even intended for Tea. In theory the Japanese bowls might have been expected to be better, but in actuality the Korean are far better. (“Irregularity”)
According to Yanagi, Japanese potters struggled to do what came perfectly naturally to the Korean craftsman, because they were caught in the aporia of constructing imperfection. He goes on to say that “Our common sense is of no use for Koreans at all. They live in world of ‘thusness’. . .” It’s hard not to sense a patronizing dimension to this praise, but I think this nicely encapsulates both the importance of Korean art for Yanagi and the worldview through which he viewed national characteristics. Korean pottery is uniquely representative of “irregularity . . . the highest form of beauty known to man” but is seemingly only capable of achieving this due to a sort of innocence or lack of reflection. The hope of Mingei, then, is to find a way back to this pre-reflective, unmediated art process after the fact.
* This piece was greatly informed by the research of Kikuchi Yuko including “Yanagi Sōetsu and Korean crafts within the Mingei movement” in The British Journal of Korean Studies 5, 1994: 23-38 and “A Japanese William Morris: Yanagi Soetsu and Mingei Theory” in The Journal of William Morris Studies 12, no. 2, 1997: 39-45. “The Beauty of Irregularity” appeared in The Unknown Craftsman, published by Kodansha International, 1972.