
#Funk Wabi
Melodies move through time and space in many ways. Adam Wojcinski from the Australian Bush makes music, but doesn't play a note. His melodies weave together many art forms and flow past our beating hearts in liquid form.
"You make a poetic melody of different art work: calligraphy, flowers, utensils, clothes that you wear, food that you select for the gathering. There are many different disciplines involved….and Bam! The Tea Ceremony."
Adam's musical thoughts are strained into a cup; preferably the kind built on a traditional pottery wheel and infused with artists that personify the “tea mindset”: Bjork, David Bowie, and MCA from the Beastie Boys to name drop a few. His melodies dance, dip, and flow through the codified 400 year old Ueda Soko Samurai Tradition of Tea from Hiroshima. His hashtag is #funkwabi, and through his "jam sessions" he is giving tea fresh wings.
“Funk wabi is an aesthetic that celebrates blood, sweat and tears. Funk wabi is raw emotion that seeps out of a person’s transient performance; it is a piece of nature pulsing with a sense of the germination, the pinnacle, or cessation of life force, like a dandelion shooting up between cobblestones in a graf laneway; funk wabi is an artwork that makes you view your raw, unconscious drives as beautiful. Think of Ikkyu f*cking in the Pure Land. Funk is unbridled life force sweating through the surface, wabi is a beauty and morality that reveres transience and laughs at perfection. Put them together and you have an aesthetic that celebrates the rapture of being alive because it has an acute sense of impermanence and imperfection."
Butoh captures the essence of his improvisatory style along with wabi, the beauty of transience and imperfection: where bodies become one with sacred utensils used to "purify and cleanse." The artistry, when "true to the form", holds its own as an avenue to heal the self and furthermore, "when it breaks the form an avenue opens up to transcend the self."
Samurai would return from battle and use tea to ground themselves and appreciate the essence of their cause. Many moons on, Adam's warpath is to remove hierarchy and ego from his craft as shown in his installation, Tea Takuhatsu, and infuse a new vitality, find a relevant purpose for tea in today's wildly spinning orb.
“With everything that is happening there is an even greater urgency for people to have a hell of a lot of tea in their life."
He juggles his Ganesha of projects as he zigzags across the globe between Australia, Japan, Paris, and New York. Plotting his own constellation, he has found the path that allows him to do his work: teach, perform, speak, lecture, translate, inspire, and put his 'etudes' (conceptual tea ceremonies) into reality. "Yoko Ono's Grapefruit is one of my favourite books. Some of the conceptual tea rites can be performed and other’s are purely for the mind." The Dismembered Tea Ceremony was one of the alluring few that came to life in Iceland with Canadian artist Natalie Lauchlan.
(htto://www.natalielauchlan.ca/)
"I have a strong connection with my Grand Master. I use the Ueda Soko name for formal things and my Funk Wabi name for my art that breaks away from tea tradition."
Through artistry, like his twenty-four hour tea ceremonies in graffiti alleys, or his ode to Hiroshima on an Icelandic mountain, Adam provides experiences that give permission to feel "the rapture of being alive, feeling the beauty of life pulsating through.” Adam is a sensei to tea but more importantly a sensei to blood flow: an artist in motion.
"The value of the art is realised when we use it."