Wabi-Sabi Syntax #13

Wabi-Sabi Syntax is a conversation between tradition and technology, control and chance, past and future. It is a need to search, for meaning in imperfection, for truth in error, and for the self in translation. At its heart is the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, the beauty found in things that are fragile, worn, or incomplete. After years of living in Japan, the artist's sense of what matters in art gradually shifted and became more complex. Perfection no longer seemed fully honest, and flaws began to feel like new fingerprints. Into this journey, the artist brought something else, his Mexican heritage. Living between two cultures, he carries the weight and wonder of both, along with the uncertainty of that collision. Mexico and Japan are two worlds with different ways of seeing, remembering, and making. What happens when these visions coincide? When their symbols do not match? When one culture misunderstands the other? Rather than smooth over those misalignments, the artist leaned into them. Frictions and misunderstanding became a space for new ideas. The tool for this new exploration of in-between states and worlds was artificial intelligence. He began feeding his own photographs into the models. He wanted to see how the machine would read his images. Another collision was happening, human and machine. What would it make of his visual memories? What would it get right, or wrong? The AI responded with pictures that resembled traditional Japanese woodblock prints, ukiyo-e, but something was always off. Eureka. He had found a way to visualize all these confronting ideas: perfection and imperfection, cultural dissonance, past and present, memory and reality. These confrontations are palpable in the imperfect representations AI naturally produces. Mistakes became part of the work's grammar, a kind of new syntax made of errors and echoes that condenses the many layers of Derech's life experience. We are left with questions. Can a flaw carry emotion? Can a misstep be beautiful? Can a machine, in being flawed, reveal something human?