An English translation of the edited transcript of László Sári’s speech at the opening of the KOMOREBI group’s debut exhibition is now available. You can also watch the recording of the speech.
The exhibition
Title: Wabi-sabi, the Beauty of Imperfection – the KOMOREBI Group’s debut exhibition
Venue: Start Gallery Budapest, Margit körút 15–17
Announced opening: 22 September 2022, 6 pm
Artists: Brigitta B. Horváth, Gábor Tobak and Angelika Fekete (Analóg Angelika)
Opening speech: László Sári, scholar of Eastern cultures
The exhibition brought together Brigitta’s jewellery made with the mokume-gane technique, Gábor Tobak’s works with wood, and Analóg Angelika’s paintings. The original exhibition announcement introduces the artists and the idea of wabi-sabi in more detail.
Original exhibition announcement in English · Video of the opening speech · Gábor Tobak’s artist page · Analóg Angelika’s artist page · Hungarian transcript
Brigitta B. Horváth online: Facebook · Instagram · ArtHungry portfolio · website
László Sári’s opening speech – edited English transcript
This is an English translation of a transcript edited from automatic speech recognition. It has not yet been checked word for word against the complete recording; some wording may still need correction.
I, too, warmly welcome everyone here. What am I doing here? That will become clear in a moment. What is a scholar of Eastern cultures doing here? I’ll tell you how this came about and how this rather unusual situation can be explained.
We began with wonderful music. Thank you, truly. I’m glad to have met the musician and his instrument. It may be a small instrument, but in Asia, too, percussion instruments have an astonishing richness. They can produce every kind of musical variation; sometimes even a large orchestra needs nothing beyond percussion. So we are in the right place. We have found ourselves among wonderful music and wonderful works of art.
All of this is connected with the East. It is not only the music that has such a connection. The works of art do too, of course, and quite strongly. This is true of all three artists. I was delighted when I read the few sentences online about this connection.
There is a weight of thought here—these are big words, but I mean them sincerely—that tries to grasp the most urgent questions of the human mind. And more than grasp them, it tries to say something about them: to depict what cannot be grasped. That is an exciting undertaking, and one worthy of the greatest respect.
Art as a whole can go to hell if it does not attempt these impossible things. That is our task as human beings. What on earth are we doing here otherwise? Especially when we turn to a broad public and claim that we have something to say. Then it turns out we do not: we bleat and stammer, unable to say anything about these burning questions. We evade them, lie, prettify things and show off.
We try to give the impression that we know something you do not. But we are not really going to tell you, because you would not understand; it is too difficult and not really for you. Still, please take an interest and buy our works. Art often appears in our world with something like this attitude.
It is not as though philosophy can say much more about people and the human world. There are two things that may bring us closer to understanding the world. One is the scientific method. Philosophy is part of that, and it dares to move quite close to these urgent questions.
The other is art, but much of it is outrageous nonsense. It can be obscure, foolish, arrogant and condescending. It does not even dare to say that it is attempting such questions. Yet it takes courage to state them. These are the great questions of existence: being, change, transformation and the processes we can see here, for example, in the paintings.
In Gábor Tobak’s works there is also the passing of time, impermanence. These are all ontological questions. It is unsettling, but these are the questions we must address. Some people never come near them, yet present vague works with nothing to say under the mysterious guise of pseudo-art. In effect, they look down on us while counting themselves among minds capable of communicating something about the world through art. And they take great offence when we expose or laugh at them.
Even if there are no answers, we must still ask the questions. Here the questions are asked—asked with tremendous force. That alone takes a courage deserving enormous respect. To say, “I am willing to struggle with this, even though I have little chance of finding a good answer”: that is admirable, to put it modestly. We might even pay tribute to such courage and daring.
We are looking at great things here. We only need the courage to think about what they are. The few lines we can find online help us.
Angelika’s paintings show us the prospects and possibilities of change, of processes, of release from states that bind us—to quote her own words. There truly is something to say about this extraordinarily difficult subject. What processes and changes are these, the ones we must speak about at all costs? Every tiny part of our hearts, souls and bodies plays a role in these smaller and larger processes.
And then there is the jewellery, the world of plants. In some Buddhist schools, rebirth even allows the possibility of being born as a plant. The changes plants undergo; the dignity, beauty and irregularity of plant life itself. Perfection is the murderer of all beauty. We must embrace the beauty of imperfection, because that is the only path to beauty. Perfection kills everything. There is nothing to think about in it; we hardly even look at it. But what is imperfection? An endless succession of unpredictable, irregular processes.
Once again, we are in the East. Buddhism says that the only constant in the world is change. Change speaks to us most chillingly through loss, through the passing of time. If something is bad, it is bad; there is little to say about that. But the good passes too, damn it! We cannot even truly enjoy it, because it may be gone five minutes from now. So what am I to do? These thoughts shape my entire relationship with the world.
The beauty of passing: as Gábor Tobak writes of his work, we can see the flowers of decay there, one might say. They are beautiful. We can become absorbed in passing things, and we can find beauty in their passing.
These are all thoughts that Western civilisation has given up on, because there are no answers to them. The questions they raise have no reassuring answers. They do not give the human being, human existence or human activity a settled place in the order of the world. In this realm the human mind can only fail, because there really is no good, comforting answer. We must accept and face the fact that we see and know all this and, if we have any sense, bear it with dignity.
Here, I tell you, the questions have been asked; here are answers. I have rarely been to an exhibition that gave me something to think about. Most of the time there is nothing to say. Lies, evasion and deceit are common in galleries and exhibition rooms. I rarely encounter such open, clear honesty and daring. I am glad fate brought me here and that I could discover the works of three such artists, along with the ideas behind them—ideas that are easy to discover and deeply exciting.
Thank you very much. I do not want to say more. If we have the chance to look at these works more closely and for longer, we will discover how dangerous they are. We will also discover that I could only stammer about these questions. These are worthy answers. Whether they satisfy us is another matter, but they are worthy answers. Let us value these artists and hope they can hold this impossible position throughout their lives, and that this thinking, this character and this approach appear in every work they make.
Thank you for letting me be here and see them.