I remember Kanye West debuting Yeezy Season 2 at New York Fashion Week in 2015, standing in front of rows and rows of scantily-clad, emaciated-looking bodies draped in skin tone shades; a monolithic gradient crescendoing from lighter beiges up front to deeper, darker browns in the back. And again, I remember images and videos of his “Sunday Service” during Coachella in 2019. A small man-made mound, covered in artificially lush grass, served as an altar to worship monochromaticity, placing Kanye and his peachy worshippers one step closer to piety. When I’m asked what I think about minimalism, these are the images my brain conjures immediately. But Kanye West is far from the only worshipper at the pulpit of modern minimalism; he is an easy representation for it, though. His version of minimalism has come to be widely recognized and accepted, even celebrated (hallelujah!). It’s a fusion of utilitarian design, muted tones, and a vision of the future that seems apocalyptic—everyone is in need of military surplus gear and pared-down basics, both survivalist and “high-concept.” It is a minimalism that espouses reverence and devotion to cleanliness, purity, and control. It speaks the language of modern cultural attachés; a rebellious subculture of folks who are self-reliant, detached from consumerist constraints, if only cosplaying at this idea.

And if I can be so bold, I believe this is the most popular image of modern minimalism currently. It’s curious we now associate minimalism with this sort of flat, sanitized, and muted aesthetic. The clean lines of Ellsworth Kelly, Piet Mondrian, or Peter Halley surely should be (and are) considered in a minimalistic vein, but they could not be more different than what Kanye West puts forth. Perhaps there was even a time when these artists were the first associative images that came to mind (even before Marie Kondo). When did the cultural or societal understanding and appreciation of minimalism change? Have we all been so inundated with the callousness of society’s great pressures that we need a valve release, a collective cooling, that would lessen the demands on our minds and our attention? Have we rejected ornament, detail, decoration, and vivid color because we’ve entered this technological age that always prioritizes function over form, that necessitates a uniformity for the purposes of efficiency, information-sharing, and scalability? Maybe, but I don’t think there’s just one culprit here, rather a mélange of idiosyncratic, overlapping, and bewildering histories.

At the heart of it, what is the difference between a Japanese ryokan or onsen and Kanye West’s Tadao Ando-designed Malibu home? Maybe it has something to do with the quality of materials, although I doubt it because I’m quite sure both value the premium, high-grade stuff. Perhaps it has something to do with craftsmanship or sourcing, although yet again, I have to confess, I’m still a bit skeptical. I think it has less to do with materiality and more to do with the intangible qualities and histories that are sometimes difficult to pin down. Certainly, there’s an argument to be made here about taste and subjectivity; images, stories, and legends that are either relevant or not within the current cultural zeitgeist. But that just scratches the surface; behind today’s modern minimalism, there lies an insipidness, vacancy, and vapidness of character that comes with one, and not the other.

Aman Kyoto—a modern riff on Japan’s ryokan inns

Modern minimalism’s fake immateriality—which is to say, an extreme importance to the circumstances that have brought about its popularity—demands an examination beyond surface aesthetics and the endorsements of cultural influencers. It necessitates looking back even farther than what we might’ve initially believed was necessary. Upon doing so, we’ll find an emptiness, not for simplicity’s sake or to wage a war against capitalism’s destructive forces (Mr. West might be an embodiment of this force), but rather an emptiness of heart, mind, and what so many design minimalism conversations coalesce around, soul.

When you put a Second Empire or Victorian home side-by-side with new construction projects made of sleek concrete, vinyl siding, and glass, most people would say the new construction lacks “soul.” What does it mean to have a soul in this context? Is it equivalent to having an opinion, a worldview, or something that you can hold in your mind’s eye and agree with or refute? Maybe it’s like a fishing line, cast out into the world to see what attention you can grab, or a metaphorical doorknob that can lead to new places or refuse entry to others. Is a soul here a feeling, a sensation, that can be known but not seen or clearly defined? Is it patina from a past known or unknown that imbues a sense of place, character, quality, time, or some other number of defining characteristics? Perhaps a combination of all these possibilities?

Beauty and meaning cannot be defined outside the constraints of culture, and so I think this serves as an excellent starting point. In Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future, the author writes, “Things get messy when humankind’s seemingly ceaseless capacity to create rubs up against our limited capacity to understand our influence.” The glut towards “everythingafication” has its roots in the capitalistic machine that’s wreaked havoc on our ecosystem, the human attention span, the creative process, and the list goes on… This isn’t meant to completely trash capitalism, although there’s plenty of room for improvement; it’s meant to explore what we truly value. The voices we include, and more often the voices we exclude, can tell us what we value.

Even though the “Congress on New Maximalism” is fictitious (thank you for your inventiveness, Nathan Robinson), we wish it weren’t and believe in its manifesto, which lays out clearly what’s at stake:

“We are told that capitalist society wishes to increase production, nothing but production. This is true. But is it production of more? No, it is the production of more of less. The ceaseless quest for profit means shaving a thing down to its bare essentials asking the question, ‘What is the minimum degree to which a Mexican restaurant must resemble a Mexican restaurant for people to accept it is one?’ This makes profit-seeking phenomenally efficient. It also means dullness, decrepitude, death. If a thing cannot justify itself economically, it must disappear. Wilderness, ornament—they cannot justify themselves economically, therefore they are to die.”

At what point will a cheaply made undergarment be regarded as exactly that, instead of the high-brow, high-fashion item it wants to pass itself off as? This kind of hoodwinking is the oldest form of deception, as imperialism has always centered Whiteness (you weren’t expecting it to go there, were you?). In 1810, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote his Theory of Colours, which has several statements disagreeing with Newton’s scientific principles, now widely accepted as fact (such as white light containing all colors—Goethe argued that color arises at the edges between light and dark, whatever that means). It’s a largely unscientific piece of work that lacked any quantitative rigor, repeatability, or empirical falsifiability, things that help define the scientific method today, but it remains influential for its theories regarding the psychological or phenomenological aspects of color—that is, how we feel and perceive color.

Goethe mentions, “Savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.” Contextually and historically, this makes sense even if it’s repugnant. The Protestant Reformation, characterized by a moral suspicion toward ornamentation, opulence, and sensory pleasure, began in the 1500s and continued well into the following century. Sometime around 1685 was the Age of Enlightenment, which prioritized reason, logic, and order over sensuality, emotion, or excess. In the late 1700s, a revival of Roman and Greek aesthetics, emphasizing minimalism and purity, emerged, known as Neoclassicism (which was in stark contrast with the Baroque and Rococo styles that came before). And finally, the Victorian Era, lasting from around 1837 to 1901, codified modesty, moral discipline, and emotional repression, particularly in dress and decor. The slave trade was established in the 15th century and at its peak through the 18th and 19th centuries (~1700-1808). Goethe’s Theory of Colours was published in German in 1810 and translated into English in 1840.

Removing the natural richness and warmth of textures, colors, nature, and all the things we know to provide joy in human environments has seeped into so many aspects of our lives. For millennia, the phenomenological elements that produce childlike wonder, curiosity, and awe have been systemically beaten out of our surroundings and ethos, replaced with the staid practicality and taciturn style of adulthood. Not to mention the even more sinister reasons for erasing anything that might seem distasteful to White proclivities.

This elimination of color and the cultivation of physical and metaphorical Whiteness was carefully crafted and refined, and came to dominate worldwide. Color was spontaneity, emotion, and irrationality, while Whiteness was the antithesis: discipline, reason, and refinement. Indigenous art was “craft” or “decoration.” Western dress, architecture, and education were exported all over the world to save and civilize. Creating these aesthetic binaries helped legitimize a system of domination and create separation; it helped to effectively “other" entire cultures of people.

*Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against A Sharp White Background),* Glenn Ligon (1990)

I’m reminded of a series of artworks by Glenn Ligon based on, or inspired by, an essay called, How It Feels to Be Colored Me, by Zora Neale Hurston. The works are large pieces covered in different repeating phrases from the essay. The letters are black ink against a white background, overlapping and obscuring each other, covering the entirety of the canvas. The effect is that of a modern scroll or scripture. Ligon said when he first started using oil paint and letter stencils, he quickly realized how difficult it was to keep them from smudging—to make perfect letters every time—and so he leaned into that messiness. The sum of the artworks’ parts is much greater than their whole. Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against A Sharp White Background) (1990) is particularly absorbing.

If minimalism needs to be situated within a historical and cultural lens, then I also think it’s important to understand pace layers: the relationship between components of our system that have variable change rates and different scales of size, allowing the faster-moving parts to absorb shocks, and the slower-moving parts to maintain the duties of continuity. Minimalism is a trend that can go in and out of vogue, just like any trend, but in our current moment, it’s being treated like culture. Between slow and fast pace layers, it takes time for one to adapt, adjust, receive, and metabolize the other’s feedback. As Stewart Brand says, “Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes… Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.”

When we use a trend as if it’s culture or infrastructure—a slow layer as if it’s a fast layer, a fashion as if it’s culture—we risk throwing the delicate balance of our adaptable system out of whack: “Each layer must respect the different pace of the others. If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost. If governance is suddenly changed instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian Revolutions.” Perhaps you think this is too far, too grandiose, of a statement to make about Kanye West’s Yeezy fashion show (and maybe you’re right), but it’s actually not when you trace the influences back to see how our pace layers have interwoven, responded, catalyzed, calibrated, and evolved to get us to our present moment. Our designs matter. Our language matters. Our systems, and their origins, matter. And the slower layers take a long time to respond to the endless feedback loop that is our cultural consciousness (or lack thereof). We must be careful what we feed in, what we let foment, what we allow to take root.

So, what is the difference between Japanese minimalism and the whitewashed walls of a Malibu house? I’m not entirely sure (I’ve written this much just so I could say this to you), but I know there is one. The concept of “Ma 間” is fundamental to Japanese aesthetics; it’s the space and time between objects, actions, or ideas—not only physical space but pauses, silences, and empty or white space. A lot of Western minimalism—or I should say, a lot of the understanding and interpretation of Western minimalism—is concerned with sparse detail, stripping things down to their bare, most expedient elements, insisting on a lack of clutter and decoration. There is a difference: one is the presence of space, perhaps the ability to see clearly and speak wisely, and the other is a void, a lack of something, anything.

This isn’t minimalism’s fault, nor should it be blamed (if it can be). The modern interpretation has co-opted, even subverted, a minimalistic practice and aesthetic into this sickly, hollowed-out, new-age version to fit more neatly into the hurried, capitalistic culture we exist in today; it aims to whitewash our history and how we got here. Perhaps it’s time for a reevaluation.

Minimalism Is Not Neutral

Designing the Future of Childhood Learning

“Becoming a Writer” by Dorothea Brande