THE ART OF SMALL THINGS by John Mack. London: British Museum Press, 2007, 224 pp., with 200 color
illustrations, £19.99 (cloth)

Here is a splendid catalog of the world made small — miniature works in the collection of the British Museum: Elizabethan rings, Benin masks, Netherlandish rosary beads, Chinese jade carvings, Japanese netsuke (kimono ornaments).

Small, even tiny, they loom huge in their photographs, suggesting, as states the author in his stimulating ethnographic essay, that "the most important, symbolically motivated or powerful may be the least in scale . . . the miniature occupies a contained space. It may be controlled, possessed, but has at its heart an inherent mystery."

This mystery may be various things. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said "all miniatures seem to have an intrinsic aesthetic quality," and one thousand years earlier Sei Shonagon penned in her "Pillow Book": "All things small, no matter what they are, all things small are beautiful."

Beyond aesthetics, however, there loom in this miniature world equally large considerations. O-Young Lee, an authority on this subject, has listed some of them. We "reduce the world in order to understand it, reduce the world in order to express it, reduce the world in order to manipulate it."

These reasons he finds particularly apt for those master miniaturists, the Japanese. In fact, he finds here their essential outlook toward the world, and in his important work on the subject, "The Compact Culture" (1982), he expands and explains the reasons for making small.

Since John Mack's British Museum book has a whole section on Japanese miniatures, and since the readers of this column are apt to be curious about local examples, we might look at some of Lee's findings.

He believes that miniaturization lies in "the Japanese love for abbreviation." This he traces in the language ("mother complex" — maza konpurekksu — mazakon), in the literature (the haiku), in the less-is-more aesthetic of Japanese art, and in much else.

"The smaller we shrink nature the more control we can have over it," says Lee, "and the more it bears the mark of human interference. We might say that bonsai is foot binding applied to nature . . . to suppress nature's innate aspiration toward growth, to restrict natural freedom to a fixed shape, human interference is required."

Japanese industry is highly rewarded by this interference. Sony, standard-bearer of the transistor revolution, used the tactics of reductionism. As its spokesman has said: "To make things smaller yet retain high quality, to make things that are interesting and useful — that is the Sony spirit." This is also the spirit of reductionism, says Lee, "and, in a way, the spirit of Japan itself."

The country was, indeed, "able to modernize so quickly, to assimilate Western ideas so easily," says Lee, "because its people never adhered to the Chinese and Korean concept of nature as a force standing in opposition to a materialistic approach to the world."

This British Museum catalog shows that other countries share this spirit, though not perhaps to the Japanese extent. The mark of beauty and the mark of control are, nevertheless, there. To see them in this beautiful book is to be believe them.

As for Lee's important, indeed seminal, book, its original publisher (Kodansha International) allowed it to go out of print after its later edition of 1992, and re-publishing does not seem to be an option.