#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."

Adam "grew up in the sticks," Toongabbie (regional Victoria, Australia) and delightfully laces his refined tongue with colloquialism and figures of speech. "They had a whole lot of gunk in their stomachs after a day of battle, they would feel yuck," he says of the original Samurai. "The tea ceremony was vitally important to the Samurai and their spiritual strength," his voice rocking between "really enhanced vowels" and quiet reflective thought, a whisper from his collection of past lives.

Ultimately he doesn't forget the match that lit his life lantern. "When I was a kid I was really interested in music and particularly the Beastie Boys. MCA from the Beastie Boys was going off the rails and then he found Tibetan Buddhism. He started to weave Tibetan Buddhism and the meanings into his raps. Ill Communication was when I was just about sixteen and it is still one of my favourite albums. MCA's insights and wisdom drew me in and I started reading about it." This led him to Buddhism in general, and to Zen and Zen aesthetics, which today, all guide his revolutionary ideas towards the Art of Tea.

"It's a different sense of beauty that I had never come across because western aesthetics is all about harmony of form, perfection, and symmetry whereas Zen aesthetics is about imperfection and asymmetry. Finding the beauty in all phases of the natural process rather than just the flourishing point; not just when everyone is at their most beautiful."

Adam combines Japanese beauty and Australian authenticity."Wabi is the overriding experience of tea. Wabi is life trying to push itself through despite hardship…there is always some wanting or longing or hope but it is not directly present. That is very familiar to me because I grew up in the Australian bush so I came across this all the time. The cycle of life is very present in country life."

Harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility are the backbones of his art, "to that I would add togetherness - the main value of the World of Tea Gathering." Incorporating and respecting the evolution of tea, he has built a hammer from his knowledge as a sensei, zen aesthetics and buddhist principals. He is one of five in the world who is "allowed to do kencha....dedicatory tea offering for buddhas, gods or people no longer living in this world...only transmitted by mouth." He is smashing the form and putting it back together so we can have a better view, and see the form more clearly.

"Traditionally it was only males that did tea ceremonies, and mostly samurai - tea was as expensive as gold. People would trade tea for land so it had tremendous status - Samurai were the highest class of Japanese society. Only 130 years ago, a law was passed that all women should study tea before they can be married - before that it was a male thing."

With the World Tea Gathering, his visionary reworking of the traditional Chaji and collaborative projects with artists of all guises gaining momentum, he is creating, not a storm, but a bushfire - invigorating knew life into tea - respecting the codified tradition of tea by moving it forward, "I want to smash that and let people get totally involved, swirl it around" he says of the Chaji, a formal tea gathering of a: meal, charcoal, incense, koicha, and usucha which when Adam does it becomes: 'koicha, meal, sake, and performance. Like a symphony, it is more of a transformative experience," he says of his craft considered "a poetical medley of the unconscious, esoteric and zen mind."

Today Adam's phone is about to go flat, he knows how to connect globally through his visually raw website and popular Instagram account. But that self publicity is all something he has to do. "I feel incredibly un-comfortable receiving things. I believe in esoteric buddhism and that we live in a swirl …but you need that stuff (money) to get around." His disco ball of talents is powered by the interactions he has with his colleagues and the people that he meets. His eyes meet mine warmly, instantly prepared to give to a stranger, not dissimilar to the way he stops mid interview to embrace an artist friend who walks casually through the door - people are his priority always, he is consistent, his values aren't turned on and turned off to appease - they are there always. As an only child who saw the brilliant metaphors hidden within the on screen work of George Lucas, and in high school would scream his thoughtful lyrics out through the cover of his metal band, "writing songs was something that I liked a lot. I would scream them out so people couldn't understand what I was saying." He still writes poetry today. As a "young lad' he would sit in a nook on his roof, drive his Datsun, play piano, crash on the drums, and think about the "deeper things we can't see with our eyes but know are there. I'm interested in what makes spirits tick."

His energy and warmth was first noticed when he travelled to Japan as a young man of 20 and attended his first tea ceremony in Hiroshima.

"The atmosphere that I had been searching for was present in the tea ceremony. This is an activity designed to bring into everyday life and have it fully present all the time. The Sensei of the ceremony said 'your aura, your aura - I like your aura' and she asked me back the next day…"

He was instantly welcomed and began tea ceremony training on his initial scholarship through ACU, where he studied Philosophy and initially German, before replacing his desire to be bi-lingual with Japanese as his preference.

'It's a very musical language, and because the poems are very rhythmic with a set number of syllables and you have to fit into that structure, everyday conversation bounces in a lovely tempo."

When he returned for further study, his highly respected Sensei set him straight in terms of his desire to enter a monastery. "She said: it would be a terrible waste if you were to put yourself away facing a wall in a temple for the rest of your life. Find a way to live your life that way through tea."

Check out his stuff. He has. He is. He will.