Chapter 17 Section 4 Bonsai

Bonsai is a combined art, that is, one scene, two pots and three frames, the art of the Trinity.As separate forms, scenery, pots and frames must be artistically conceived and produced. When pots, landscapes and frames are skillfully combined into one, all three works will be sublimated. Mountain rock bonsai stands out from playing with stones, appreciating stones, and stacking stones in gardens, and rapidly develops into an art form with its own unique artistic personality.In the murals of the tomb of Prince Zhanghuai in the Tang Dynasty, there is a court lady holding a rock bonsai, which may be the earliest image record of the rock bonsai.In addition, Tang Sancai rockery and bonsai, and Song Buddhist stone carvings of Zhongshan stone bonsai (such as the one held by the Buddha in Xiaofowan, Dazu Baoding, Sichuan), etc., are all examples of ancient Chinese rock bonsai appreciation.The combined sculpture of mountain and rock bonsai also embodies the idea of ​​returning to nature, which is not unrelated to Laozhuang and Zen thoughts. It is a different form of the same motif of landscape painting and landscape poetry.Therefore, the mountain stone bonsai actually shows the beauty of concentration and deformation.These beauties not only reflect the natural style, but also reflect the realm of art.

Mountain rock bonsai is created with stones of various materials and shapes.Mountain and rock bonsai has sister arts such as landscape painting, landscape poetry, and landscape literature as references, as well as the experience of stacking stones to form mountains since the Han Dynasty, so mountain and stone bonsai is a very ancient and very rich variety in bonsai.Although the mountain rock bonsai is a combination of landscape, pot and frame, the most important part is still the production of landscape, that is, the production and selection of water stones and dry stones.Water stone bonsai is a condensed magnificent mountain and river. It is combined according to some principles of Chinese landscape painting, with the purpose of creating a landscape artistic conception that can be lived and traveled; Conceive and create.Compared with water stone bonsai, dry stone bonsai is more abstract.Dry stone bonsai generally use exquisite or unique hard stones to be placed directly on the wooden base, such as Taihu stone, Ying stone, Lingbi stone, etc., so this kind of bonsai is also called "stone offering".Stone offerings have been popular since the Song Dynasty.Of course, the stone offerings at that time were not necessarily all in the form of dry stones. For example, the strange stone offerings made by Su Dongpo were to pick colorful stones from the Yangtze River in Huangzhou and soak them in water for appreciation, which is similar to the way of enjoying Yuhua stones today.Dry stone bonsai is actually the same thing as playing with rocks since the Tang and Song Dynasties, so when introducing mountain and rock bonsai, we generally focus on water stone bonsai.

The shape of water stone bonsai has no fixed style. There are mainly several types such as solitary peak, overlapping, and denseness. In each type, especially the latter two types, due to the different shapes, volumes and combinations of stones, the shapes are ever-changing. The principle of bonsai "moving the sky and shrinking the earth, and potting the world".The creation of water stone bonsai is like a landscape painting. It is necessary to "search for all the strange peaks and make a draft" and "have hills and valleys in your chest".The difference is that the water stone bonsai expresses the experience of nature in a three-dimensional way. Because of the different experience, the created works have different styles.For example, Sichuan has famous scenic spots such as "Qingcheng is secluded in the world, Emei is beautiful in the world, the Three Gorges is dangerous in the world, and Jianmen is majestic in the world", so its landscape bonsai shows the style of "quiet, beautiful, dangerous and majestic".Another example is that there are Guilin landscapes and numerous karst caves with unique scenery in Guangxi, so its landscape bonsai pursues the tastes of clearness, openness, danger, and broadness.And these styles or tastes have become the unique features of a certain school (such as the so-called Sichuan school and Gui school) in the production of landscape bonsai.

The trend of modern sculpture pays more and more attention to the performance of the material itself, and pays more and more attention to the texture of the material itself.At this point, the production of Chinese landscape bonsai has been going on like this from the very beginning.Stone selection in landscape bonsai is particularly important. In addition to stone quality and shape, stone texture (texture of stone) is what bonsai producers pay attention to.For different stone textures, Chinese landscape painters have given image names such as axe, folded belt, hemp, raindrops, and lotus leaves. Although they mainly refer to the type of stone texture, they are actually another name for the shape of the mountain, such as Axe mostly refers to steep and precarious mountains, folded belt refers to overlapping and turning mountains, hemp wrapping refers to smooth and gentle mountains, raindrops refers to majestic and heavy mountains, and lotus leaves refers to towering and upright mountains.Understanding these contents is of great benefit to the appreciation of landscape bonsai.Generally speaking, if you focus on mountains, you can appreciate them from high distance (overlooking), flat distance (horizontal view), and low distance (looking up). Distant mountains), Miyuan (smoke and desert, wild water separated and seemingly invisible), Youyuan (scenery is extremely remote and faint) to appreciate.Although these are the appreciation methods of landscape paintings, the appreciation of landscape bonsai is still common.If you look at the details, the appreciation of stone (stone veins, stone texture) can be regarded as unique to landscape bonsai.The texture of the stones used in some landscape bonsai surpasses the theme of the landscape and becomes an independent aesthetic object, achieving a special effect of rising from one place to another.

In the 7,000-year-old pottery carvings of the Hemudu Culture in Zhejiang, there is a potted plant with a flower, which may be the oldest record of tree bonsai.Tree bonsai, also known as potted plants, selects some trees that are suitable for viewing and easy to plant in pots.The production of tree bonsai is to use some tree species with good tree posture and long life, such as cypress, pine, plum, willow, fir, pomegranate, rhododendron, and southern tianzhu, etc., after artistic conception, artificial methods such as cutting and bandaging are used to adjust the shape of the tree. It is processed to make the tree have the style of old trees.Bonsai trees are alive. Between natural growth and human artistic goals, constant adjustments are needed to make them both natural and artificial.A successful tree bonsai, from initial molding to continuous processing until completion, takes at least a few years, as many as decades, or hundreds of years, and often takes the energy of not one generation but several generations.

The shape of tree bonsai can be divided into straight trunk, oblique trunk, curved trunk and horizontal trunk according to the straight, oblique, curved, and lying trunks in the pot; according to the shape of the trunk or branches extending out of the pot, it can be divided into clinical Equations of water, branches and cliffs; according to the shape of the roots, it can be divided into the equations of connecting roots and lifting roots; according to the withered and old parts of the main trunk, it can be divided into the equations of withered and withered shoots.In addition, there is a pot with multiple plants planted together, imitating a jungle in the mountains, and so on.These different shapes can create different artistic conceptions.For example, in the cliff style, most of the pines are fully or half-hanging out of the basin, giving people a green wave exploring the sea.Another example is the water-facing style, where the tree trunks protrude out of the basin, but do not hang upside down, which makes people think of a beautiful woman looking in the mirror while facing the water.In addition to the modeling beauty of general sculptures, tree bonsai also has a changing beauty and a flowing beauty.Tree bonsai mainly shows its artistic charm by the appearance, color and charm of roots, stems, leaves, flowers and fruits.Zhou Shoujuan, a well-known bonsai expert in my country and one of the founders of Suzhou School bonsai art, has accumulated a lifetime of experience and experience, and specifically summarized the beauty of tree bonsai as the beauty of form (the posture of trees, the buckling of trunks, the cracks of trunks, the density of leaves, The uplift of roots and tendrils), the beauty of color (the color of the tree crown), the beauty of seasonal changes (various changes in the shape of buds, leaves, flowers, fruits, etc. that appear in different seasons, and the transformation of leaf color), the beauty of age changes (the The shape changes due to the increase of age).It can be seen that the enjoyment of the beauty of tree bonsai is rich and multifaceted.

In addition to the two major types of bonsai, trees and landscapes, there are also water and drought bonsai and flower bonsai in between, which are composed of plants and stones.These two kinds of bonsai reflect a part of nature, like broken branches of flowers or a corner of landscape.This kind of bonsai seems inconspicuous, but it is a good place to express your affection and sexuality.For example, a lone rock with two bamboos planted beside it looks like a small garden scene, but from this rock and two poles of thin bamboo, it makes people feel a lot of emotion when thinking of how many lonely, upright and honest people in the past dynasties.Xu Youren, a native of the Yuan Dynasty, said in a poem: "Two poles of thin bamboo and a piece of stone contain endless poems from ancient and modern times" ("Tizi Ang Bamboo Stone"), which is an excellent summary of this feeling.

Excellent bonsai works are always subtle and evocative, evocative and reminiscent.It enables viewers to use their hearts and feelings to participate in the creation and complete the unfinished meaning of the works.Works that are too explicit are not good works. For example, putting a fishing boat means "fishing alone in the cold river and snow", putting a horse means "falling flowers and stepping on horseshoe fragrance" and other poetic artistic conceptions. Mediocre and shallow, without poetry at all. Whether it is jade, stone or bonsai, there is an important way to appreciate it: play.For other forms of sculpture, such as pottery sculpture, stone sculpture, bronze ware, etc., is there any such thing as playfulness?To answer this question, we must first understand how the sculpture is completed.As mentioned earlier when primitive people made stone tools, the production standard is the combination of sensations when used extensively, which is actually the essence of sculpture.Every sculpture must be a composite of the sculptor's various senses, the most important of which is touch.Any surface, any part, records the author's psychological and artistic feelings of touch, so the completion of a sculpture incorporates a lot of the author's touch feelings.People's perception of a three-dimensional object is accomplished through sensory organs.The eyes are only a part of the sensory organs, and the eyes alone cannot really complete the feeling of it.When a sculptor talks about his sculpture with others, the most common habit is to touch the work while discussing it. This is the best way for the sculptor to regain the feeling of his own work.The smoothness, roughness, coldness, and warmth of the material cannot be judged correctly without touching.If damage and contamination to sculpture works are excluded, touch should be the most basic form of understanding sculpture.This is the answer to the previous question.