Here’s an exquisite, powerful old tree that features some wild twists and turns. I found it here. My guess is it’s a Shimpaku juniper that was originally collected in the mountains of Japan. A further guess is that it fell into the hands of one of the Japanese masters. One more guess; it was professionally photographed and appears in a Japanese bonsai book or Bonsai magazine Okay, I stand corrected (see comments)
That Old Question: Naturalistic vs Highly Styled Bonsai
Though nature originally grew, shaped and aged this wonderful old tree, there is no pretending that humans didn’t have a strong hand in bringing it to the way it appears above. At the risk of stating the obvious, this combination of nature and the hand of man is how a bonsai comes into being. Some bonsai exhibit more nature and less man, and others exhibit less nature and more man, but all are bonsai. Which you prefer (if you have a preference) is simply a matter of taste.
How this tree came into being
A lot went into creating the tree you see above. Nature originally grew, shaped and aged it. Then someone found it, dug it up, put it in a growing pot, nursed it to health, did some pruning to remove unwanted branches, fed it and grew it on to develop the foliage, shaped the foliage, did extensive carving on the deadwood, added numerous little touches and potted it (the ‘someone’ mentioned above is most likely at least two, probably more different people).
The tree below has a simpler history
The tree below belongs to Dan Robinson (Elandan Gardens). You can find it and many others in Gnarly Branches, Ancient Trees (one of the most ‘eye opening’ bonsai books you’ll ever see). Dan does all the human parts himself, collects, grows on and styles. With Dan’s approach, the ‘styles’ part is minimal; he lets nature do most of the talking. But don’t be fooled into thinking he just digs ’em up and pots them. What Dan does involves an expert eye and very subtle ‘just enough’ approach to styling.
Mountain Hemlock by Mother Nature with some help from Dan Robinson (“The Picasso of Bonsai”). From Gnarly Branches, Ancient Trees by Will Hiltz.
Wayne,
Sorry to say this, but…. This tree is not Japanese!!! Also, it is not yamadori! This tree was trained by Taiwanese bonsai master, Lee Jhong Hung, from Kaohsiung Township. It won top awards in the 2009 Taiwan Bonsai Creators Exhibition, the 2009 and 2010 Hwa Fong (National Bonsai Style Exhibition of the R.O.C) and the 10th Asia Pacific Bonsai and Suiseki Exhibition held in Chung Hwa, Taiwan. Although it was masterfully carved by Mr. Lee from dull field grown material, it is now owned by Mr. Chiang Jin Cung, a well known collector.
Warm regards,
Jose Luis
Wayne,
I forgot to mention, the original Taiwan Juniper material is about 30 to 40 years old and ALL the dead portions of the tree used to be alive. The bark was stripped and the dead wood carved with 100% hand tools; no power tools whatsoever!
Warmregards,
Jose Luis
Hi Jose,
Oh well. Wrong again. Those Taiwanese bonsai artists do amazing things with home grown stock. Almost hard to believe, but I do believe you,
No power tools! The labor of love.
Wayne,
Almost 100 percent of the juniper bonsai in Taiwan are developed from field grown material. By using hand tools and removing the fibers (Diaoke or Sidiao) it is possible to create Jin and Shari like those developed in nature.
Warm regards, jose Luis
Thanks again Jose,
We’ll post some in the future on the Sidiao technique. I’ve tried it a little on my trees and like the results, but haven’t done it enough to say too much.
Hello,
To be fair and honest I don’t believe in “extremly” naturalistic views from artists like walter pall, dan robinson and a thousand European artists who “sell” this naturalistic aproach to Bonsai, in the end they just look like they love the art but they can’t be real bored of wiring again and again and styling their trees for 20 years in a row searching for true perfection like TRUE Japanese Artists have done for more then a 1000 years.
I believe in different aproaches to the art but if you enter an art form with more than 1.700 years you must be humble enough to understand that you are not a piooner, you must respect the path you walk on, so one day you can create your own style. In Japan many of WP trees for example would be considered neglected.
I respect WP and Dan love for nature and they are free to do what they enjoy doing, but calling it Bonsai is a lack of respect for all the history of Bonsai has an art form and all artists who have choosen to follow the path of learning the wisdom of styling trees has Bonsai.
People often mix opinions with a lack of knowledge, in Japan trees are styled to look natural, but Bonsai is an art where usually the goal is to represent a very old tree who has experienced a hard path, but very old trees in nature have a strong very condesend foliage, closed apex, often driftwood and a huge ramification structure…etc etc etc and that is the goal of most Japanese artists…
For example if you look at Dan tree, yes it looks beatifull, looks raw and natural, but the natural of a very very very young tree, if you walk in the woods I’m sure you will see a bunch of this young trees look like this…but if you stand near a very very very specimen believe me it will not have this look and feel.
So if the European (not only!) Naturalistic is to make a representation of very young trees in pots, well I must say that it’s ok, but do not mix real Bonsai with this idea.
David
Thanks David,
I agree with some, but not all, of what you say. The Japanese masters have elevated the art of bonsai to the sublime and most western artists could learn plenty from the Japanese. And of course there are great Asian bonsai artists that are not Japanese, though many of them are in the tropics, and I don’t think it’s fair to compare tropical bonsai with cold climate bonsai.
However, I do think artists like Walter and Dan exhibit talent and passion for the art, and I have no trouble with them calling what they do ‘bonsai.’ It’s certainly not the same as much of what the Japanese artists are up to, and agreed, not as advanced in many ways, but still, to my eye, many of their trees are beautiful and inspiring (BTW: I don’t mean to say that I would necessarily lump Dan’s and Walter’s bonsai together).
One more issue. Where I live in the northeast, I never see trees quite like Dan’s when I walk in the woods. It may be true that there are places out west where you find trees like his, but still, I don’t think you’ll usually many of them in one place.
Thanks again. It’s a discussion worth having.
Wayne,
Respectfully, I believe that it is possible to compare sub-tropical or tropical bonsai with temperate trees. For example, Zelkova serrata,Ulmus parvifolia, Juniperus chinensis, Pinus parviflora, var. Morrisonicola (Taiwan white pine) are trees that are commonly used as bonsai subjects in the tropics, which often present as much dramatism as those seen in Japanese publications.tropical bonsai, as well as colder climate trees are , in my opinion, at the same level
Warm regards,
Jose Luis
Thank Jose,
I didn’t mean to imply that you couldn’t compare tropical with cold climate bonsai when it comes to styles, or drama, or beauty or expertise. More and more, brilliant bonsai artist are from tropical and sub-tropical climes. No problem
What I was getting at, was more the time frame and degree of difficulty in producing quality bonsai in cold climates. Bonsai artists can do things with trees in the tropics that you couldn’t dream of in cold climates, and what can be done in cold climates, takes much longer than in the tropics.
Hi Wayne,
Bonsai in Japan, was very different 50, 70 years ago than what we know as bonsai today.
The japanese masters back then styled their trees a bit differently, and by no means can anyone disregard their mastery/artistry.
SOmeone who knows what naturalistic bonsai is can understand how much detailed work needs to be done in order to apply it to a tree.
The late great John Naka taught: “we have to make our bonsai look like trees and not the trees look like bonsai”
Many times, when we style our trees, we are trying to imitate nature.
Can any of us say that picasso is not a great artist because his paintings are so different from Monet, Van Gaug etc?? Of course NOT.
Everything is a matter of taste. If a person does not like the specific style, it does not mean that we should disregard it. Sometimes i feel that the japanese bonsai are so faultless, so perfect that look almost like plastic. I am not trying to imply anything here, since we all agree that the Japanese masters lead the way. What i am trying to say is that some of Walter’s & Dan’s trees have a certain kind of wilderness in their beauty, character; and they do exactly what late Master J. Naka used to say: they are bonsai looking like trees.
Stavros
if Walter and Dan are wrong because they haven’t followed the “rules” set by countless Japanese generations , then what of the Chinese or Vietnamese or Korean styles of bonsai ? are they lacking talent or passion ? because they are not the same as the Japanese trees .
the regimented rules of branch position etc doesn’t occur in nature and therefore many Japanese trees look like what is drawn by a child (but they are what they are BONSAI TREES) not natural looking tree that could be found in a field or mountain
The “art” of bonsai hardly dates back 1,000 years, at least not the art of bonsai that’s recognized today in Japan. Heck, wire has only been used for about 100 years or so in Japan, probably less. It pushed much of the styles ones sees as somehow “ancient” today. Closed apex, close branching with movement, styled driftwood are all products of wiring, sometimes brutal wiring.
To imply that the West’s innovation with less-rigid poodled styles is somehow less valid than the innovation the Japanese have done only in the last 50-100 years is silly.
And if have never seen old Western US trees, you have very little perspective to judge someone who is emulating them so well. Dan Robinson’s trees hardly look “young.” All you have to do is go to the high desert, or the tree line in the Rockies or Sierra Nevada, Cascades, or just about any other Western U.S. mountain range and look around. You will see what old trees truly look like –and they don’t look like Japanese bonsai…
I don’t get all the “my way is the only way” discussion. Choosing one style of bonsai is like choosing one style of art. Certainly realism has more history than abstract but neither is less legitimate. I prefer Dan Robinson’s style over mushroomed bonsai or Junipers on steroids that seem so popular today but we can certainly prefer one style over another still respecting the traditional masters.
Thanks Stavos,
Well said. Interesting how many times John Naka’s quote comes up in these kinds of discussion. The old master lives!
Still, there are bonsai that don’t look like trees in nature that I’d still call bonsai. Some of them are so stylized that to me they are something quite apart, alive and thriving (in that sense natural) but quite unnatural in appearance. I think a good example of this is the Kimura tree in yesterday’s (May 10th) blog. You could scour every inch of the earth and never see something quite like that growing in the wild.
Thanks Tim,
I like what you said about what is drawn by a child. Gives pause for thought….
Most comments so far aren’t saying one style is wrong. There are preferences for sure, but it’s encouraging to note that very few people are taking a black and white approach. A few ‘shoulds’ creep in here and there and that can be a little lamentable, but overall, I’m seeing a lot of intelligence expressed.
Thanks rockm,
Agreed. Dan’s trees don’t look young to me either. And agreed again, the best innovation in Japan, the West and elsewhere, is always welcome.
Thanks John Burrows,
Yes, I agree with much of what you say, especially the part about respecting the traditional masters.
BTW: I don’t think most of the comments are in the ‘my way is the only way camp’ though that tendency does pop up from time to time.
Thanks Stravos for saying quiet a bit of what I wanted to say.
A few quick disagreements with David.
Naturalistic Bonsai is NOT the shortcut taken by Bonsaists who don’t have the patience to wire and style their trees regularly. The effort that goes into creating naturalistic bonsai is greater than or equal to creating conventional Japanese trees. The end objective as Walter so correctly puts it is to make the trees “APPEAR” to be untouched by human hands but rather show ONLY nature’s hand.
Dan’s trees or for that matter Walter’s trees do NOT look like young trees at all.
If one has studied the evolution of Japanese bonsai styles, over the last 100 years (and I have spent some time doing so), it is clear the as per the present day Kokufu standards, the trees that had made it to Kokufu 10 years back would’nt stand a chance today. The trees that the Japanese were calling bonsai a 100 years ago would be laughed at if even displayed in small towns exhibitions let alone major bonsai exhibitions. If one sees the pictures in the book by Japanese Master Yuji Yoshimura – the famous rule book, none of them would be allowed within 100 yards of the Kokufu or for that matter any other contemporary Japanese Bonsai exhibition today.
My inspiration for Bonsai design comes from an unusual book titled “Remarkable Trees of the World” by Thomas Packenham. None of the trees in that book (quiet a few are over a thousand years old) look like the Japanese trees. Though quiet a few of them look like Dan’s and Walter’s trees.
Would conclude by saying that though Vincent Van Gogh and Picasso’s paintings have a whole lot of differences, yet both are great artists. Similarly the Japanese who have a distinctive style and Masters like Walter and Dan who have a different but distinctive style are both great approaches to the art of Bonsai. One does not have to pull down one to lift the other up.
Ravi
Thanks Ravi,
Points well taken. You could go even farther with the painting analogy; say comparing an old master like Rembrandt with Franz Kline, or even Jackson Pollock. Though the nature limits of bonsai may preclude such extremes.
Hi Wayne,
I always enjoy the articles you post, and normally do so silently, as I rarely engage in on-line discussion. I do so this time only because you posted a subject comment from someone who shares my first name but not my point of view.
I am surprised and puzzled by the fact that the bonsai community is still chewing over a subject that the rest of the visual arts world put to rest almost a hundred years ago. The problem might be partially one of semantics, so I propose that instead of discussing whether a bonsai is “natural” – whether produced in Japan, Taiwan, or the United States – we recognize that no bonsai is “natural”, no bonsai hides “the hand of man”. They are artificially dwarfed trees in pots, for Pete’s sake! It might be more useful to use the terms “realism” and “abstraction”. All bonsai are suggestions of trees in nature, or most usually, of other bonsai. They are not perfect scale models, they are not photo-realistic images, they are all to some degree, abstracted images. Bonsai such as Dan Robinson produces are certainly closer in many cases to realism in terms of the ancient trees he chooses to portray. The very beautiful and elegant Taiwanese bonsai at the head of your post is of a school that is more abstractedly sculptural, and unabashedly displays the technical skill of the artist in the precisely arranged dome of lush foliage that rests serenely (if rather incongruously) on the wildly contorted, stripped trunk. The point is that all bonsai are abstract, but they are abstract to different degrees, and in different ways. The degree or type of abstraction is not central to determining whether a given bonsai is effective as art; more to the point is whether it has something to say, whether it tells a story, whether it stirs emotions, whether it is admirable, whether it is beautiful. The world of western painting moved from realism to impressionism in the 1870’s and into pure abstraction in the early decades of the 20th century. The days are long gone when the legitimacy or value as art of any of those styles is questioned. It’s about time we in the bonsai community caught up.
I am complete amateur, but I accepted bonsai hobby as interesting and relaxing activity…. I cannot say anything smart and experience based about bonsai, I cannot say the difference between Korean, Taiwanese or other close but similar styles. To me, all little trees are lovely, I like to learn, see others work, accept techniques and try to follow. Since bonsai is a tree in a pot, it is bonsai no matter if it will be later called naturalistic, abstract or any other name. Art is about creativity, even we should give enormous respect to old bonsai masters. If it is said that any other style then Japanese style is not bonsai, it is ok with me , lets just invent some other name and I will still do my best to grow, maintain, and take care of a “little tree in a pot”.
Another known point, but just to revive. Artistic rules are not laws. Those rules are principles because they work two directions. So, if the rule says that something is visually pleasant, breaking that rule will give a visually unpleasant result, which may be original artist’s intention, to provoke different emotion.
There is a rule of the proportion of, say, human nose.
Based on that realistic rule, who will conclude that Picasso’s work could not be called art because even Egyptian ancient 2D people were more realistic than his portraits.