Minimalism and Japanese Influence
Mei Tanaka
Vancouver, BC
Mei Tanaka was born in Kyoto and moved to Vancouver at sixteen. The culture shock was not what she expected. She had anticipated the language, the weather, the scale of the city. What she hadn't anticipated was the sheer quantity of things - in houses, in shops, in the way people talked about what they wanted to acquire.
She came from a family that didn't have a word for clutter, because things were chosen carefully and kept for a long time. Her grandmother's kitchen had maybe thirty items in it - not as an aesthetic statement but as a natural result of knowing what you needed and not buying what you didn't. Mei has been thinking about that kitchen ever since.
Her writing sits at the intersection of Japanese design philosophy and practical domestic life in the West. She is interested in concepts like ma (negative space), wabi-sabi (the beauty of imperfection and impermanence), and kanso (simplicity) not as interior design trends but as ways of thinking about how you live. She is also interested in the limits of minimalism as a Western aesthetic movement - the places where it has become as consumerist as what it claims to oppose.
Mei has written for Monocle, Azure, and The Walrus. She lives in an apartment in East Vancouver that she shares with her partner and a gradually shrinking collection of possessions.
