Suzhou-style Bonsai Appreciation: 2018 Masterpieces by Intangible Cultural Heritage Artisans of the Lingering Garden and the Humble Administrator's Garden
Suzhou bonsai falls mainly into two major categories. One is tree-stump bonsai, also known as potted bonsai, and it is in this category that the characteristics of Suzhou bonsai are most strikingly displayed; the other is landscape-stone bonsai, also known as mountain-and-water bonsai or rock bonsai, which is further divided into water-stone bonsai and dry-stone bonsai.
Suzhou bonsai emphasizes the creation of artistic conception, drawing people in with the artistic charm of a fusion between scene and feeling. It absorbs the essence of classical garden art, synthesizes the strengths of Chinese painting techniques, uses scenery to convey emotion and emotion to express scenery, and employs artistic methods such as "seeing the great within the small" to achieve an artistic effect in which there is feeling within the scene and feeling beyond the scene as well. The works are thought-provoking and leave one unable to put them down.
Bonsai of the Humble Administrator's Garden
The Humble Administrator's Garden is a representative work of Jiangnan classical gardens and, together with the Lingering Garden in Suzhou, the Summer Palace in Beijing and the Chengde Mountain Resort, is celebrated as one of China's four great famous gardens.
The Humble Administrator's Garden takes water as its center throughout, with mountains and waters winding around, exquisite pavilions, and luxuriant flowers and trees, possessing a rich water-town character of the Jiangnan Han Chinese.
The bonsai garden lies in the western part of the Humble Administrator's Garden. Past the Floating Green Pavilion and the Lingering Listen Pavilion, a bamboo fence encloses a stretch of flat open ground, inside which are displayed works of art of varying sizes and forms, many of them fine pieces of Suzhou-style bonsai.
The bonsai garden of the Humble Administrator's Garden was first built in 1954 and is one of the earlier specialized bonsai cultivation bases and viewing areas among Suzhou gardens. It holds more than 1,600 pots of assorted tree-stump and azalea bonsai, of which more than 700 pots are tree-stump bonsai, embodying the unique style of Suzhou-style bonsai: ancient and elegantly simple, ever firmer with age, free and graceful, and thought-provoking.
Bonsai of the Lingering Garden
The Lingering Garden is known for the exquisite arrangement of its buildings and its many fantastic stones, and together with the Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou, the Summer Palace in Beijing and the Chengde Mountain Resort, it is called one of China's four great famous gardens.
The Lingering Garden is a large classical private garden in China, covering an area of 23,300 sq m and representing the Qing dynasty style. The garden is famed for the superb artistry of its architecture, with spacious and magnificent halls, courtyards full of variation, and Taihu stones of which the Cloud-Capped Peak is the finest, offering "the delight of gaining mountain forests without leaving the city walls."
Its handling of architectural space is exquisite; the garden designers used various artistic methods to form a garden space system with rhythm and cadence, making it a world-famous example of the artistic handling of architectural space.
The bonsai garden of the "Another Village" area of the Lingering Garden covers an area of about 1,500 sq m. It has a long history, luxuriant flowers and trees, and preserves a pastoral charm, and together with the Ten Thousand Views Mountain Villa at Tiger Hill and the bonsai garden of the Humble Administrator's Garden, it is called one of the three great bonsai gardens of Suzhou.
The bonsai of the Lingering Garden gathers the essence of Suzhou-style bonsai and represents the current direction of bonsai development. It is unique in preserving heritage and bringing forth the new, and has received unanimous praise from experts at home and abroad.
Bonsai of every kind are placed neatly and orderly in the garden according to category, giving people a refreshing feeling.
The present bonsai garden has areas for camellia, azalea, water-stone and tree-stump bonsai, giving the garden's overall display level a qualitative improvement.
2018.04.07 (Suzhou)