The first few times I wrote by hand, I was nervous and far too self-aware, but above all, I couldn’t shake the elusive discomfort hovering above me like a dark cloud. I took to yellow legal pads and old leather-bound diaries to find solace, to delegate the page as breathing room for my whirring ideas. I’d read somewhere that writing by hand prevents you from self-editing – the biggest obstacle for most writers – and lets your consciousness lead the way without interruption. I wanted to unearth my ‘real writer self’, the one hidden under all the autocorrect and digital formatting. I wanted to have a revelatory experience filled with epiphanies and fountain pen ink.
After staring at pages with nothing but the date, I tested methods, some creative and others science based. I even took a Dalí-esque approach where I laid on the couch, passing in and out of sleep and dream, and each time I woke I’d write without thinking. After all this, I was still irked by the act. Was I worried someone was going to find it? Did I think I might lose a once-in-a-lifetime piece of ingenuity to a paper-eating pet? Or was I scared that my written words were less intelligent than my typed ones?
After days of hieroglyphs and internal monologuing, I realised that the cause of my dread and tossing and turning was the fact that nothing was finished. I’d written three half-baked short stories, a handful of poems (some abandoned mid-line) and the opening of a fiction novel. At the time, it seemed like there was no tangible evidence of work. Nothing to show for the time I lost to a temporary (and pretentious) surrealist lifestyle. I felt deflated, angry about all of it.
The next scene takes place at the Tate Modern in London. There’s a breeze coming from the south end and the gallery is murmuring with people. Upon entering the Rothko section, the tone shifts like a train carriage entering a tunnel. It’s difficult to comprehend the significance of the pieces (my heart is pounding) and as I’m taking it in, someone next to me announces, “It looks unfinished.” The phrase reverberates through the room.
“In the West, art demands clarity, finality, perfection. Artworks are typically expected to present a resolved concept or narrative, supported by a coherent artist statement or critical framework.”
The idea that art looks 'unfinished’ is neither a new nor 'hot’ take. Many abstract expressionist works were critiqued for being childish and lazy for their lack of clear forms. In Art Digest, Margaret Breuning said that Rothko's paintings in his 1949 exhibition “contain no suggestions of form or design”. In 1952, Time published a piece on Abstract Expressionism that summarised public sentiment as confused and suspicious – echoing the classic quip: “a child could make this”. Surrealist Louise Bourgeois’ The Destruction of the Father (1974), with its disjointed, almost crude forms, was initially rejected for its visceral, unresolved quality. Now, it’s praised for giving shape to emotional chaos and early feminist rage. Many other art movements have been critiqued this way: Impressionism, Cubism, Minimalism and Dada, among others. Why are we so obsessed with completion? What gives something the right to be called complete? And who gets to decide it is?
Perhaps we don’t mean to turn our nose up or scurry away from the unfinished – we just haven’t learned to sit with it. In the West, art demands clarity, finality, perfection. Artworks are typically expected to present a resolved concept or narrative, supported by a coherent artist statement or critical framework. In institutions and markets alike, the emphasis is on work that appears finished, as it is the most sellable to buyers. The Western art world, for all its talk of innovation, prioritises economic gain above the artist. It’s a stylish and impressive facet of a strong, diversified investment portfolio for many arts patrons. And because galleries and artists rely on patrons for funding, it seems that so much of what we call ‘complete’ is shaped by who’s paying to hang it on a wall.
On the contrary, the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi invites us to embrace the imperfect, the impermanent and the incomplete. It doesn’t rush toward resolution. Instead, it finds quiet moments in the undone, beauty in objects that carry the wear of time, in forms that resist symmetry or precision. You can see this in kintsugi – the art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, highlighting, rather than hiding, its fractures. Or in the irregular, hand-formed bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony, like those by raku masters, where the asymmetry and rough textures are intentional, and the marks of use become part of an object’s story.
“It doesn’t rush toward resolution. Instead, it finds quiet moments in the undone, beauty in objects that carry the wear of time, in forms that resist symmetry or precision.”
Photographer Masao Yamamoto’s dreamlike, faded prints also embody this spirit – small, weathered images that seem to be pulled from memory rather than captured in time. At its core, wabi-sabi is an appreciation of the human condition and the transience of materiality. It reminds us that decay creates life and vice versa. It is everything left unsaid.
The ethos of wabi-sabi extends beyond ceramics and calligraphy, appearing in art forms where incompleteness is less expected. In 1997, Jeff Buckley’s music career had just begun. He had just released Grace, his debut album and it received critical acclaim. He had begun making his second album when he drowned in the Mississippi River. Two years after his passing, his demos for that album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, were released. Tracks like Everybody Here Wants You and Jewel Box sound close to completion – we know that Buckley wanted to polish them further but never had the chance. Even in its unrealised state, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk carries elusive chord progressions and melodic turns that set him apart from his contemporaries. The album gives us a glimpse of the creative process of a gifted musician. Buckley’s death reminds us that artists are mortal – and that exceptional creative potential can be suspended mid-air.
Like Buckley’s posthumous demos, food publication Lucky Peach left an indelible mark not despite its early end, but because of it. Chris Ying, Peter Meehan and David Chang’s early 2010s food magazine was a successful publication that prided itself on pushing against the formulaic feel of food magazines at the time. Their imagery and art were loud and messy, often taboo – as were the subjects, writing styles and overall tone of the publication. The contents of Lucky Peach do wabi-sabi justice: hand-doodled illustrations, chaotic colour palettes and visual references that deliberately eschew the uniform aesthetics of mainstream food publications at the time. The New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells described it as, “totally unfashionable, uncommercial, counterintuitive, Instagram-resistant devotion to the art of illustration”. This was a whimsical juxtaposition to the writing, literary analyses of American dining culture and the culinary scene conducted by revered food writers from all over the country. That is why when Lucky Peach announced their last issue in 2017, readers were devastated; it didn’t feel like the publication had finished what they came to do. And thereafter, other magazines started churning out similar visuals and more daring writing. Helen Rosner said, “But the mythos of Lucky Peach is great – greater, at times, than the magazine itself – and nothing casts a legacy into the stratosphere quite like an unexpected, yet agonising death.”
I often think about which of my creative projects will be left unfinished forever. Charles Baudelaire said, “There is a great difference between a work that is ‘complete’ and a work that is ‘finished’; that in general what is ‘completed’ is not ‘finished’, and that a thing that is highly ‘finished’ does not need to be ‘complete’ at all.” How does an artist know if and when it is time to let go? I would argue that art is never finished. Even when a piece of writing is sent off, a painting is varnished and the label is added to a dress, its journey continues. People interact with it, they consume it, they respond to it. It will be used as inspiration for other art and conversation and life. Even the unseen, so-called incomplete works – those buried in notebooks, abandoned on hard drives – resurface elsewhere, reconfigured in future pieces or simply in the way we think and see. In that way, the unfinished is never redundant. In a similar vein, Roland Barthes’ literary theory The Death of The Author argues that once a text is created and released into the world, the author’s personal context, biography, and intentions become irrelevant to how the work is understood by readers; the reader creates ultimate meaning. This theory has helped ease my creative process and detach my personal value from my artistic merit in times of severe imposter syndrome. (“I am not responsible for how people experience my writing!” I cry to myself in the mirror at 3am.
In an age where personal and professional milestones are defined by numerical metrics and superficial attention, adopting wabi-sabi principles in art and life is not an easy feat. As creatives, we’re conditioned to equate worth with visibility – to chase likes, followers, grants, galleries, profit, publications. Though it is rational and expected as a creative to desire and pursue cultural and monetary relevance and status, it is vital to grow one’s relationship to the creative process and to half-written stories. We cannot bestow meaning to our craft without the acknowledgement and appreciation of work that goes unread, unseen, unheard. We must engage with the creative process actively – done most successfully in conversation with others – and learn to value it more than the end product. It’s a quiet rebellion to say, ‘that will be enough’, even when it’s still becoming.
“At its core, wabi-sabi is an appreciation of the human condition and the transience of materiality. It reminds us that decay creates life and vice versa. It is everything left unsaid.”
Of course, it is always easier said than done, especially in the fraught economy and political climate we reside in. It is challenging to think about anything other than taking on more work, when the next paycheck will be, how to balance work and life and art but artists must honour the process in order to create meaningful art. This might look like journaling for some, or revisiting a piece you’d long ago abandoned –not to fix it, but just to sit beside it again. It might mean reading old drafts aloud to a friend, without apologising for their lack of editing. Or putting a half-finished canvas away for a season, trusting that it will call you back when it's ready. Sometimes it’s about pausing mid-line and resisting the urge to resolve it. Let it hang out for a while, marinate on the page. Practicing these habits can teach us new things, and more importantly, heal our relationship with the creative process in a time of overconsumption and burnout. Just remember, work doesn’t need to be finished to be worthy of our time. That it’s okay to honour progress for what it is: movement, not measurement.
When I return to my handwritten writing, I can never say for sure how I will react. Sometimes, I snicker or laugh, other times I read it slowly and bookmark it to remind myself to continue writing. These days, I have less discomfort writing by hand, and sometimes – but rarely – it’s a solution to a problem. Writing by hand seldom feels like work (which is why I avoid it – more on that in therapy). It’s a meditation. Similarly, my mother practises Chinese calligraphy in her spare time, but in calligraphy, the word’s meaning carries less weight than the appearance of the brushstrokes. The characters must be beautiful – but not perfect, since that’s impossible. Despite this, she writes the same two characters a hundred times, dipping the brush into ink, touching the tip to paper, dragging the brush down. Perhaps writing by hand never really feels finished. Perhaps that is the point.
