By Leonard Koren

Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional. Leonard Koren was trained as an architect but never built anything – except an eccentric Japanese tea house – because he found large, permanent objects too philosophically vexing to design. Instead he founded avant-garde magazine Wet and currently writes and publishes books about design.