Art & Creativity Quote by Stephen Gardiner

Space is doing the heavy lifting here, and Gardiner knows it. When he says that in Japanese art space "assumed a dominant role", he’s not praising emptiness as a tasteful aesthetic preference; he’s pointing to a different hierarchy of meaning. In much Western art and architecture, the object asserts itself first and the void is the leftover. In the Japanese traditions he’s gesturing toward, the interval (ma) is treated as an active element: it shapes attention, sets rhythm, and makes presence legible by refusing to shout over it.

The second clause is where the argument tightens. Zen isn’t invoked as exotic incense but as a philosophical scaffolding that legitimized this reversal of priorities. Zen concepts - impermanence, non-attachment, the value of direct perception - are a cultural permission slip to let things be partial, unfinished, and quiet. Space becomes not an absence to be filled but a condition to be inhabited. The viewer’s mind completes the work; meaning happens in the pause.

As an architect, Gardiner is also smuggling in a critique of modernity’s compulsion to over-specify. Postwar design culture loved function, density, and control; Japanese space offers a counter-move: flexibility, threshold, ambiguity. The subtext reads like professional advice disguised as art history: stop treating buildings as objects and start designing the intervals - the courtyard, the corridor, the breath between walls - because that’s where human experience actually lives.