At its core, ‘wabi-sabi’ focuses on accepting imperfection, transience, impermanence, and incompleteness.
Essentially, you’re appreciating beauty and the creations of nature despite any asymmetry, roughness, or austerity that you might perceive. In other words, you strive to accept the fact that nothing is ever perfect, finished, or everlasting.
The concept of ‘wabi-sabi’ started gaining more and more prominence online in the autumn of 2025. It spread after internet users rediscovered a clip from the old animated series ‘King of the Hill,’ where Bobby Hill says how he likes that his rose is a “little off-center.” According to Bobby, “It’s got wabi-sabi,” which he refers to as an Eastern tradition “celebrating the beauty in what’s flawed.”
The audio from that scene then became a viral TikTok sound, Know Your Meme reports. And so, more and more internet users are referring to ‘wabi-sabi’ in their clips, photos, and posts.
Meanwhile, the BBC defines ‘wabi-sabi’ as the confluence of “the elegant beauty of humble simplicity” (‘wabi’) and “the passing of time and subsequent deterioration” (‘sabi’). Trying to define ‘wabi-sabi’ is poetically ironic, though.
“Just as Buddhist monks believed that words were the enemy of understanding, this description can only scratch the surface of the topic,” the BBC states.
“The concept of wabi-sabi highlights the importance of acceptance in Japanese culture, a society forced to contend with devastating natural disasters on a semi-regular basis. Rather than casting nature solely as a dangerous and destructive force, it helps frame it as a source of beauty, to be appreciated on the smallest of levels,” the BBC explains.
Tanehisa Otabe, a professor at Tokyo University’s Institute of Aesthetics, told the BBC that the ancient art of ‘wabi-cha’ (a style of tea ceremony) can actually be a good introduction to ‘wabi-sabi.’ In the late 15th to 16th centuries, tea masters Murata Juko and Sen no Rikyu chose rougher, common Japanese pottery instead of imported and technically perfect Chinese items. In doing so, they challenged the rules of beauty.
“Without bright colours and ornate designs to rely on as signifiers of accepted beauty, guests were encouraged to study subtle colours and textures that would previously have been overlooked,” the BBC writes.
According to Professor Otabe, “wabi-sabi leaves something unfinished or incomplete for the play of imagination.” By engaging with something that may be considered to be ‘wabi-sabi,’ you achieve 3 main things:
- You gain an awareness of the natural forces involved in the creation of what you’re perceiving
- You accept the power of nature
- You abandon dualism and embrace the idea that you are not separate from your surroundings
