Abstract
The Japanese arts, landscape design among them, have long acknowledged and practiced the mixture of contrasting formal properties: the cultivated and natural, the smooth and rough, the straight and irregular. The terms shin, gyo, and so—loosely translated as formal, semiformal, and informal—describe the predominant character of a work such as a floral arrangement. A precise definition for each of these modes is lacking, and rather than three clearly determined categories, formality is ultimately gauged by degrees. Each of the formalities, when applied to flower arrangement for example, should evoke the mood appropriate to its setting and its time. By extension, these modes informed fields such as textiles and landscape design. But in contrast to strains of Western practice that stressed a homogeneous ordering or a simple opposition, Japanese landscape design has juxtaposed and embedded contrasting properties within one another as a means of instigating continued comparison. Through this practice, simple forms and materials resonate with heightened richness.
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