YUGEN

The Japanese word yūgen has no English analogue. It is a sense of sublime beauty, inaccessible yet tangible, inexplicable yet undeniable. It is the sense of awe that we cannot articulate upon seeing that which we cannot possess; it is sunlight threading across slow-moving water, the final leaf detaching from a tree, the dance of a lonely snowflake. Here, Yūgen captures that sense of beauty beyond the veil. Thin, gestural stripes reveal and conceal a textured undercurrent – an ephemeral presence, a ghost haunting the border between the real and the ideal – a tantalizing promise of perfection that we cannot obtain.

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