Hasegawa Tohaku and Japanese aesthetic of ‘waki’

Hasegawa Tohaku, Folded painted screen, 1608.

I’m very interested in recent research about the Japanese aesthetic of ‘waki’ :

“…austere natural beauty. Artists challenged to endow voids, absences or limitations with significance. Links with Buddist philosophy of emptiness, poverty, silence and stillness conveying a paradoxical plentitude. The attention can settle without distraction, calm rather than excite.“

- from ‘A Hundred Ideas that Changed Art’ by Michael Bird, 2013

There is a sense of a single moment caught here. The trees move in and out of the mist as though in and out of existence. A limited colour pallet adds to the calmness and serenity. Also a sense of divided time with divided panels, each a snapshot.

From Japanese Prints - From Early Masters to the Modern” by James A. Michener, 1959

“A work of art consists of two parts, which are mutually repellent. Firstly a work of art must exist as an idealistic concept in the mind of a human being or ‘a felt stimulus within the viscera’. It is generated from an intuitive impulse…When the intuitive impulse is accepted and understood, it is consciously elaborated into a full developed master idea.. The second requirement of a work of art is its realization in some objective form which the human can perceive.”

"A work of art is both an idealistic concept, never fully realised, plus an objective realization whose function is to remind the world that the complete work of art exists.”

A “print can be nothing but a constellation of accidental physical components, held momentarily by their relationship to the master idea.”