Everyday we find random damages as we walk down a street, such as debris from buildings, remaining bits of stickers, posters that are almost coming off, or spray paints. While these damages are often dismissed as something negative that has to be cleaned up, they may also be regarded as artworks in a sense that they can be aesthetically pleasing and show histories accumulated over time.
Such way of thinking can be found in Kintsugi(金継ぎ), which is a Japanese pottery art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted with gold. Kintsugi shows how to embrace natural tendencies of things maintain a physically damaged form, and find meanings within it.The philosophy behind the Kintsugi art is Wabi-Sabi(侘寂), a traditional Japanese aesthetic of finding beauty in imperfection. It is an important concept for designers and consumers in a modern era where industrialization creates and discards new and perfect things everyday. In Wabi-Sabi, damages are things to be embraced, which are not ugly but rather naturally beautiful. Likewise, wouldn’t it be possible to find pleasure in the damaged shapes on the streets rather than removing or replacing them?
The master project, Inevitable Forms, deals with the natural and interesting forms on the streets. A total of 102 cracks collected from streets in Weimar are recreated as graphic elements through various visualizations. Forms are transformed into completely unpredictable shapes through simplification, rasterization, etc. And these confusing and irregular forms leave a lot of room for imagination.
In the exhibition, participants were encouraged to compose their own piece of art by freely arranging the shapes printed on transparent acrylic sheets beneath an overhead projector. On the website, like a shopping mall, participants put the shapes in the shopping cart and create their own artwork. Parts of the city that has been were considered old and useless are now transformed into something valuable and attractive.
https://inevitable-forms.web.app/#/
Web Developer: Hiyeon Kim