“Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” wrote Leonard Koren in his book 'Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers'. It is a beauty of things modest and humble, and of "things unconventional". Peripherally associated with Zen Buddhism, wabi-sabi values characteristics that are rustic, earthy, and unpretentious, involving natural materials which are used neither representationally nor symbolically.
A drawing by Dick Bruna from 1975. Early Miffy editions show a greater tension between his will to achieve elementary form, almost geometry and the glitched impossibility of achieving this by hand. Somewhere in this impossibility is the best bit. The wabi-sabi.
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