Mingei: The Beauty Blooming on the Fringes of Capitalism

The limitation of aesthetic sense in capitalism lies in its evaluation of value solely based on rarity. On the other hand, the concept of "Mingei" proposed by Soetsu Yanagi, a Japanese art critic who passed away in 1961, was different.

Soetsu, paradoxically by modern standards, found beauty in everyday, unbranded, inexpensive, mass-produced items born out of necessity and crafted by hand. This philosophy shares common ground with the Arts and Crafts Movement led by William Morris.

At the end of the 19th century, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, inferior industrial products flooded the market. Morris's movement advocated the importance of the beauty of handcrafted items in response. A few decades later, when modernization waves also reached Japan, the market was similarly flooded with shoddy products. In response, Soetsu Yanagi's Mingei movement emerged in protest.

While these two movements shared common roots across countries and eras, their subsequent developments diverged significantly. William Morris established the "Morris & Co." and worked on developing beautiful products crafted by hand. However, the result was that the products became expensive, limiting their market to a few affluent buyers who considered them bourgeois hobbies. Later, Liberty took over the designs, achieving commercial success through mass production, completely absorbing Morris's ideal into the market.

On the other hand, Soetsu Yanagi remained in the periphery. His role was not to create products but to discover value. He continued his artistic pursuits and personal collection of Mingei items, emphasizing intuition and personal aesthetics. Many of his collected items are still carefully preserved and displayed in the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Meguro Ward.

Soetsu's sense of beauty rejects the intentions and arrogance of the creators. Instead, it values the natural "beauty of utility" that arises from unconscious, optimized hand movements in the mass production process of uncelebrated, affordable everyday items. This represents a more thorough pursuit of functional beauty than the Bauhaus movement, emphasizing non-branding, non-authorship, or in other words, the appreciation of inaction.

This sense of beauty was passed down to his son, Sori Yanagi, who belonged to the generation directly influenced by modernism, including Le Corbusier. Sori Yanagi pursued a path as a product designer, creating numerous functional and "non-authoritative" works in the age of mechanization. Despite establishing himself as one of Japan's leading designers, the prices of Sori Yanagi's works never skyrocketed like Eames furniture, for example. His items, such as kettles, bowls, teapots, and cutlery, are exceptionally beautiful upon closer inspection. However, they remain readily available at affordable prices as "ordinary" everyday items.

In a world where everything is drawn into the game of information value, the continued existence of Mingei philosophy is a beacon of hope. Efforts by Marcel Duchamp and Virgil Abloh to put an end to that game were ultimately absorbed into the perpetual cycle of the market. In contrast, the beauty of Mingei neither challenges nor submits to it but quietly continues to bloom on the fringes of capitalism.