Today's View - Big Head Sculpture

I love this sculpture. It's very Angkor Wat meets urban chic or something. Took this in May 2008 in a small downtown park in Indianapolis.

wabi sabi

Wabi-sabi (in Kanji: 侘寂) represents a comprehensive aesthetic world view sometimes described as beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”

It's hard to describe from a Western perspective, an aesthetic born from complex Japanese cultural traditions and external influences. Wabi-sabi centers on the acceptance of transience: Beauty is in the ordinary and mundane, in the flawed, in the humble but elegant simplicity achieved by bringing out the organic colors, shapes, and textures of natural materials. Expression and meaning are derived and defined not only in terms of what is present, but in what is not present in a composition. Beauty is in the aged patina, in the rust attached to “lived” objects.

Wabi-sabi is the opposite of our Western ideal, born in Greek philosophy, of the beauty of perfection and immutable youth. It stands in stark, simple contrast, to the overly decorated evolution of the Western expression of design where "more is better."