One Time, One Meeting
- Diamond Zhou
- Apr 19
- 14 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
April 19th, 2025
Ichigo ichie (一期一会) is a Japanese phrase often translated as “one time, one meeting,” meaning that each encounter is unique and will never recur in exactly the same way. The concept originates in the Japanese tea ceremony, where host and guest honour the present gathering as something that “will never happen again.” Traditionally attributed to the 19th-century tea master Ii Naosuke, ichigo ichie became a guiding principle to “cherish every meeting or opportunity, as it might never happen again.” In essence, it is a mindfulness practice: a reminder to fully engage with the moment and treat each interaction, be it with a person, a cup of tea, or a work of art, as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This philosophy of presence and impermanence has rippled far beyond the tea ceremony. In modern and contemporary art, particularly in Western traditions increasingly receptive to Eastern ideas, ichigo ichie offers a profound lens through which to understand both the creation of art and the experience of viewing it. Artists, museums, curators, and audiences have all, in various ways, embraced the notion that art is not just an object or image but an encounter in time – an encounter to be treasured for its singularity.
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Many modern and contemporary artists have internationally made impermance and ephemerality central to their creative process, echoing the spirit of ichigo ichie. By the mid-20th century, the notion that an artwork could be a fleeting event rather than a permanent object took hold. Pioneering artist turned theorist Allan Kaprow, influenced by composer John Cage’s Zen-Buddhist leanings, coined the term “Happening” for performance-events that exist only in the moment. A Happening, Kaprow explained, had no repeatable script or final product, it was art unfolding in real time, often with audience participation and chance elements making each iteration irreproducible. “Every time a piece was performed or exhibited it would never be the same as the previous time,” notes one summary, “providing a unique encounter for each individual who partook in the experience.” Indeed, the ephemeral was not a side-effect but a goal of Happenings: the event was “a temporary experience” that could not be conserved in a gallery, leaving behind only photographs or memories. Kaprow and his contemporaries thus treated art as experience, “the action, activity, occasion, and/or experience” itself became the art, “fundamentally fleeting and immaterial.” This radical stance embodied ichigo ichie: the artwork existed only in its one-time meeting with participants.
Performers and performance artists pushed this philosophy further, treating the present moment as the only relevant medium. Scholar Peggy Phelan famously wrote that “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” In other words, the magic of live art is that it exists only once, any recording is merely a trace, not the thing itself. This view, influential in Western performance art, resonates strongly with ichigo ichie. It suggests that the value of the art lies in the unrepeatable exchange between artist and audience in real time. Many contemporary performance artists have built their practice on this principle of presence. Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei is perhaps one of the most poetic contemporary proponents of ichigo ichie. His projects revolve around gift-giving, vulnerability, and shared experience. In The Moving Garden project, tens of thousands of flowers were gifted between strangers as part of the work. Lee says: “In this project I present a space with beautiful, fresh flowers. Museum guests are invited to take one of these flowers with them when they leave the museum, if they will agree to do two things: first, to make a detour from their intended route when leaving the museum for their next destination; second, along this detour, to give the flower to a stranger who they feel would benefit from this unexpected act of generosity.”
Other art forms have also embraced impermanence as a creative ethos. Visual artists have at times treated the making of art as an irreversible moment in time, analogous to a Zen-like happening. Abstract Expressionist painters in the 1950s, for instance, viewed the canvas as an “arena” in which an action takes place once, a burst of gestures capturing the artist’s immediate presence. Jackson Pollock’s famous drip paintings were less about the finished image and more about the action of painting itself, performed in an absorbingly present state. Kaprow, inspired by Pollock, observed that the painter had “destroyed painting” by shifting focus from the product to the act. Kaprow wrote: “Strokes, smears, lines, dots, etc. became less and less attached to representing objects and existed more and more on their own, self-sufficiently.” Thus, the creative process in Western art was reconceived as something alive and unrepeatable. Even when a painting or sculpture results, artists began to emphasize the moment of creation, the ichigo ichie of the artist confronting the medium, as the true heart of the work.
Many contemporary artists have also drawn direct inspiration from Eastern philosophical ideas of transience. An example is the British land artist Andy Goldsworthy, whose outdoor sculptures are explicitly designed to decay, disintegrate, or melt. Goldsworthy assembles works from ice, leaves, stones, or twigs, fully aware that natural forces will soon alter or erase them. All of his pieces are designed to disappear as nature takes its course. By collaborating with nature’s temporality, Goldsworthy creates art that lives and dies in the landscape, often within hours or days. Viewers lucky enough to encounter one of his creations in situ know they are witnessing a fleeting configuration of materials that will never exist exactly so again. Goldsworthy’s work has been called the embodiment of a Japanese aesthetic ideal known as mono no aware, the awareness of impermanence and how nothing, ultimately, lasts very long. Mono no aware calls to a feeling of sensitivity to the transient nature of things, a wistful sadness at their passing, and a recognition of life's ephemerality.
This sensibility is closely aligned with ichigo ichie. Standing before a delicate Goldsworthy ice sculpture at dawn, which will vanish by noon, one intuitively feels the poignancy of the moment, a moment of elation and an experience of clarity and truth. The artist himself frames his practice in plain human terms: “a lot of things in life do not last.” His ephemeral projects, he says, end the moment they are completed, existing thereafter only in memory or documentation. Yet, far from lamenting this, Goldsworthy finds beauty in it. His arrangements of leaves or arches of stone invite us to see, truly “see”, the transience in nature, and by extension the precious transience in our lives. It is an art of the present moment par excellence.
Other Western artists have pursued ephemerality in equally inventive ways. Conceptual and performative works in the 1960s Fluxus movement, for example, often involved one-time actions or interactive events (Yoko Ono’s famous 1964 performance Cut Piece, where audience members gradually snipped away her clothing, was inherently unrepeatable in its exact unfolding). In the 1970s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude introduced large-scale temporary installations into the landscape, such as Running Fence in 1976, a 24-mile fabric fence across California hills which existed for two weeks, and 7,503 saffron gates in Central Park, The Gates in 2005 that existed for less than two months. These monumental projects took years of preparation and existed briefly as glorious, singular events. Once dismantled, they lived on only through photographs and the memories of those who experienced them. The artists insisted that the temporality was essential to the work’s meaning. The art was in the moment of presence, when wind rippled the fabric of Running Fence against a blue sky, presenting ichigo ichie on a grand scale. More recently, the rise of digital and interactive art has led to pieces that reset or change constantly, so that no two viewings are alike. In all these cases, Western art has moved toward an appreciation of evanescence and now-ness, treating the artwork as an event or experience rather than a static object. This shift embodies a core teaching of ichigo ichie: to make something truly alive, one must embrace its impermanence.
Just as artists have explored ichigo ichie through ephemeral creation, so too have museums and audiences begun to approach the viewing of art as a mindful, unrepeatable experience. The philosophy transforms art appreciation from a passive gaze into an active, present-centred encounter. Even when contemplating a traditional painting or sculpture, objects that ostensibly persist through time, viewers can adopt an ichigo ichie mindset by recognizing that this moment of seeing the artwork is unique. The light, the context, one’s own state of mind, the subtle aging of the piece, all are factors that will never align in exactly the same way again. Art theorist Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, described the “aura” of an original artwork as “its unique presence in time and space”, a quality diminished by mechanical reproduction. In essence, Benjamin was pointing out that seeing the actual artwork, in the here and now, has a singular authenticity, a kind of encounter that cannot be duplicated by any copy. This idea intersects with ichigo ichie, which would encourage a museum-goer to treat that encounter with work a special meeting that happens only once in a lifetime. After all, even if one returns to view the same painting again, one is a different person on a different day. Each viewing is its own one-time meeting. Embracing this perspective can make looking at art a more profound and attentive act. It shifts the emphasis from rushing to see everything toward fully experiencing the work in front of you, right now.
In practice, however, modern museum habits have often strayed from this ideal. Studies famously indicate that the average gallery visitor spends only seconds in front of each artwork, around 27 seconds by one measure, and as little as 8 seconds by another study. Surrounded by a sea of artworks, visitors tend to skim, treating art as a checklist or backdrop. In our fast-paced culture of distraction, the museum experience can become superficial. Recognizing this problem, a movement known as Slow Art has gained traction in recent years. Slow Art Day, a worldwide event founded in 2009, explicitly encourages people to resist the urge to skim and instead look at a handful of artworks slowly and deliberately.
Museums themselves have started to acknowledge that facilitating memorable, singular experiences can be as important as displaying objects. Some have instituted meditation sessions or “mindful looking” tours in their galleries, inviting visitors to slow down and reflect quietly on art. Others explore immersive or interactive exhibits that personalize the encounter for each viewer. Even the layout of exhibitions can be influenced by this idea. Curators now talk about “experience design,” crafting the flow of a show to lead the viewer through moments of surprise, contemplation, or emotional crescendo, rather than just a factual narrative. In doing so they aim to leave an imprint on the visitor, to make this particular visit special in itself, not just a means to see famous items. For us, this is especially true in our own gallery. Paul envisioned the space not as a neutral container, but as an active participant in the viewing experience. Each work is given its own wall, and the architecture invites a sense of discovery: you encounter artworks gradually, turning corners or moving down narrow hallways, rather than absorbing everything at once. Departing from the conventional white cube, the gallery’s flow resists passive viewing; it asks visitors to move, to look again, to return with fresh eyes. The space itself becomes part of the dialogue, shaping not only how the art is seen, but how it is felt.
The embrace of ichigo ichie in art has also raised challenging questions for museums and curators. By nature, museums have traditionally been repositories of objects, places that preserve artworks so they can be encountered again and again by different people and generations. How, then, to handle art forms that resist repetition? The rise of performance and other ephemeral art in the late 20th century forced institutions to evolve new strategies. Some curators initially tried to document everything, through video, photography, relics, and reenactments in order to “capture” the essence of fleeting works. But as Peggy Phelan and others pointed out, a documented performance is no longer the same phenomenon; the “unique encounter” is lost. Over time, museums have come to accept ephemerality as part of a work’s identity. Major institutions like MoMA and Tate have staged live re-performances of historical performance art, understanding that each re-staging is inherently a new event (often termed a “reinvention” rather than a replica). This approach treats the artwork as something that must be periodically reborn in the present, rather than permanently frozen, an idea quite consistent with ichigo ichie. Each performance, even of the same piece, is a fresh meeting between artist (or surrogate) and audience, with its own value.
Some contemporary artists have gone further, contracting with museums to ensure ephemerality. The artist Tino Sehgal, for instance, creates what he calls “constructed situations”, live interactions often involving hired performers and unwitting visitors, and famously forbids any form of documentation or recording of them. When a museum acquires a work by Sehgal, it receives only an oral set of instructions to execute the piece; no written score, no video, no photos are allowed. Sehgal’s pieces “rely on the human responses to these ephemeral live events” and leave “no physical documentation … in the form of exhibition catalogues, video recordings, or photographs.” In a sense, he has institutionalized ichigo ichie: if you weren’t there, you missed it, and even if you were there, you carry it only in your memory. Museums hosting a Sehgal work (such as his acclaimed piece This Progress, in which visitors found themselves climbing a spiral ramp while conversing with successive performers of different ages) have to come to terms with the idea that nothing remains in their archives except perhaps an acquisition number and anecdotal reports. While this defies the traditional collecting impulse, it offers audiences a potent reward: the knowledge that “once played out”, the moment is truly gone. Experiencing a Sehgal piece can feel like being in on a beautiful secret, it heightens one’s awareness that this encounter is precious because it cannot be bottled. Likewise, other artists of participatory art, like Rirkrit Tiravanija, known for cooking communal meals in galleries, create situations that live on mainly in the bonds and conversations formed, rather than in objects. Curators have grown more comfortable with facilitating such works, effectively becoming hosts to ephemeral “meetings” rather than caretakers of objects. In doing so, they have, perhaps unknowingly, adopted the role of the tea ceremony host, setting the stage for a meaningful moment and then letting it go.
It is worth noting that not all aspects of museum culture align with ichigo ichie. The “blockbuster” exhibition that shuffles thousands of people past the Mona Lisa behind bulletproof glass, or the relentless selfie-taking in immersive art rooms, can feel antithetical to deeply present engagement. Digital technology is a double-edged sword: it can distract and encourage FOMO (fear of missing out) behaviour, but it can also foster new forms of engagement (such as VR experiences that, while repeatable as software, create unique subjective experiences for users). Some institutions have started to push back on the overuse of cameras, for instance, by designating “no photography” days or quiet hours, to encourage visitors to simply experience the art with their own senses. Interestingly, there is even scientific research suggesting that photographing an artwork can impair one’s memory of it, whereas observing it mindfully yields stronger recall. In balancing preservation with ephemerality, museums continually negotiate how to allow visitors to seize an unrepeatable moment while still providing access to art for the future. The most progressive curatorial approaches now recognize that creating conditions for intimate, present encounters, through lighting, seating, pacing, interpretive aids or the lack thereof, can turn a gallery visit into a kind of personal ritual, aligning with ichigo ichie. In these moments, the museum becomes less a storeroom of artifacts and more a theater of meetings: between viewer and artwork, viewer and performer, or even viewer and other viewers.
In contemporary society, the philosophy of ichigo ichie offers a gentle but profound counterbalance to the speed and saturation of the digital age. Our daily lives are flooded with images and information; art, too, is now often encountered in an endless scroll on screens rather than in hushed galleries. Paradoxically, this makes the direct, unmediated experience of art more valuable than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic showed that when virtual museum tours and online performances, while wonderful in reach, left many craving the physical presence of art and artists, the subtle textures of paint, the scale of a sculpture, the atmosphere of a live performance. As we emerge into a hyper-connected world, ichigo ichie reminds us that quality of experience matters more than quantity. It urges a pause for reflection: if each meeting with art happens only once, how do we want to spend that meeting? Scrolling past a digital reproduction in three seconds, or standing before the original for three minutes of genuine wonder? Consuming content mindlessly, or engaging with it fully?
Ultimately, the continued relevance of ichigo ichie in contemporary art lies in its humanistic reminder: This moment counts. In an era when attention is a scarce commodity and experiences can feel commodified or endlessly replayable, treating an artistic encounter as once-in-a-lifetime restores a sense of sacredness to art. It encourages us to put away distractions, to travel to see art in person if we can, or to truly listen and feel if we are at a live event. It also invites artists to pour their genuine presence into their work, rather than thinking solely of how it will live on as content. We see this in the popularity of immersive art environments and performance festivals - people seek out art that they must experience then and there, whether it’s an interactive light show, a site-specific dance at a remote location, or a pop-up installation that exists for one night. These are pilgrimages of art appreciation that echo the spirit of ichigo ichie. Even a simple act like spending an afternoon with a single painting can become a quietly radical act of resistance against the pressure to “see and share everything.” It can reconnect us with why art has always been integral to human life: art helps us pause, see differently, feel deeply, and in doing so, reminds us of our own impermanence and presence.
As far ichigo ichie does, it reminds us to treasure every encounter – with art, with others, with life itself, here and now, before it slips away. The next time you find yourself on a bus, consider putting aside your phone, removing your earbuds, and simply observing — the city unfolding, the choreography of strangers, the tempo of passing time. When seated across from a friend or family at dinner, resist the pull of distraction from your phone. Attend, instead, to the nuances of conversation, gesture, and presence. This constellation of people, words, and glances, whether joyful or mundane, will never occur again in quite the same way.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION Barbara Astman: Concealed/Revealed
Opening Saturday, April 26th
1:00 - 5:30 PM
