Karesansui
枯山水 / Muromachi period– / Style / Garden Styles
Japan's dry garden: waterscape and cosmos rendered in raked gravel and stone groupings alone. Ryōan-ji's fifteen stones — composition by subtraction — remain the archetype of designed emptiness cited by minimalism worldwide.
Water implied in raked gravel / Asymmetric stone groupings / A fixed viewpoint from the veranda / Radical subtraction
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Comparing primary sources and canonical works · Extracting principles that transfer to other media
- Type
- Observe the letters, signs and scale of reference works
- Composition
- Extract the one structure that governs gaze and information
- Material
- Verify the materials and behaviors specific to era, region and process
- Caution
- Don't reduce it to surface signs. Verify the context of era, region, technology and makers.
- Further study
- the fifteen stones of Ryōan-ji / Musō Soseki / Mirei Shigemori's modern dry gardens