Introduction to Suzhou Bonsai: Get to Know This Jiangsu Specialty

Suzhou is one of the earliest birthplaces of bonsai art in our country. Suzhou bonsai art has a long history and its own unique structural forms and artistic style. It is one of the main schools of Chinese bonsai, known for its long historical origins, unique traditional craftsmanship, quaint and elegant characteristics, natural and smooth style, and graceful, varied, and colorful presentation effects. It spread early to Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and America, earning fame both at home and abroad.

The development of Suzhou bonsai art was richly endowed by nature. Taihu stones are exquisite and translucent, and fine trees could be obtained at will from mountain cliffs and streamside. Suzhou's landscape is beautiful and the scenery pleasant. Historically, there were already many famous garden makers who captured the wild charm of mountains and forests into the art of urban gardens. Thus the bonsai art of "a thousand miles within a foot, shrinking a dragon to an inch" had even more models to draw on; in addition, Suzhou has long been a place where literati gathered, and bonsai art was long influenced by their culture and art, gradually forming the regional characteristics and unique traditional style of Suzhou bonsai art.

Suzhou bonsai is known for its antique elegance and rustic simplicity. Gnarled trunks and old branches of decades or even a hundred years are cultivated in small pots, yet can grow no more than a foot tall and naturally take shape, whether hanging or drooping, leaning or bending, and when paired with antique pots and Suzhou-style stands, they are full of ancient charm.

The layout and conception of Suzhou bonsai are meticulous and subtle, modeled on nature, blending with the natural, with almost no traces of carving, and rich in artistic interest. In handling relationships such as emptiness and solidity, curve and straightness, sparseness and density, opening and closing, and light and dark, the logic is clear and the craftsmanship outstanding.

Suzhou bonsai emphasizes the creation of artistic conception, attracting people with the artistic charm of blending emotion and scene. It absorbs the essence of classical garden art, integrates 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 in the small" to achieve the artistic effect of emotion within the scene and emotion beyond the scene. The works are thought-provoking and people cannot put them down.

A Marvel Among Bonsai - Suzhou Bonsai

        The development of Suzhou bonsai art was richly endowed by nature. Taihu stones are exquisite and translucent, and fine trees could be obtained at will from mountain cliffs and streamside. Suzhou's landscape is beautiful and the scenery pleasant. Historically, there were already many famous garden makers who captured the wild charm of mountains and forests into the art of urban gardens. Thus the bonsai art of "a thousand miles within a foot, shrinking a dragon to an inch" had even more models to draw on. In addition, Suzhou has long been a place where literati gathered, and bonsai art was long influenced by their culture and art, gradually forming the regional characteristics and unique traditional style of Suzhou bonsai art. The layout and conception of Suzhou bonsai are meticulous and subtle, modeled on nature, blending with the natural, with almost no traces of carving, and rich in artistic interest. In handling relationships such as emptiness and solidity, curve and straightness, sparseness and density, opening and closing, and light and dark, the logic is clear and the craftsmanship outstanding. 
        The development of Suzhou bonsai had superior natural, historical, and cultural conditions. The scenery here is clear and beautiful and the views charming, providing the best models for creating bonsai. One of the characteristics of Suzhou bonsai is that it truly expresses the natural scenery around Taihu. That elegant, light, and distant mood of sparse woods and distant mountains. Also, because it is in a temperate region with convenient water and land transportation, the variety of plants available for bonsai making is extremely rich. Suzhou also abounds in rocks suitable for water-and-stone bonsai, such as the exquisitely translucent Taihu stone, and top-grade stones such as Kunshan stone, stalactite, inkstone, and sandstone, providing ample material conditions for bonsai making. Since the Spring and Autumn period of Wu and Yue, Suzhou has always been a famous historic ancient city in southeastern China. Scholar-officials, in creating landscape gardens where they could enjoy both urban material life and the wild charm of nature, felt that bonsai appealed to both refined and popular tastes, was beautiful in both color and form, was easy to source materials for, and convenient to make. When viewed, within a foot of pot one could gaze upon the vastness of thousands of miles, and within a square inch discern a thousand-fathom beauty, satisfying their demand to gain the pleasure of mountains and forests without leaving home. Thus fiddling with bonsai became a trend of self-proclaimed elegance among the feudal scholar-officials around Suzhou. And the large amount of poetry and prose left in Suzhou's history happened to become the object from which bonsai artists drew ideas. The pictorial ideas in the works of painters of past dynasties were often also themes deliberately imitated in Suzhou bonsai. What influenced Suzhou bonsai greatly was that in the Ming dynasty Shen Shitian, Wen Zhengming, Tang Bohu, and Qiu Shizhou were renowned throughout the painting world at the time for their brand-new painting style, later called the "Wumen Painting School." Under the influence of this school's painting style, Suzhou bonsai showed a style of its own. The modern famous Suzhou bonsai expert Mr. Zhou Shoujuan also once said, "Our potted plants are, on the one hand, original creations from our own hearts, and on the other hand, modeled on hand, made according to the famous paintings of the ancients. Those made successively include Tang Yin's 'Banana and Stone', Shen Shitian's 'Crane Listening to the Qin', Xia Zhongzhao's 'Bamboo Interest' and 'Half-Window Green', and Qing Wang Yanke's 'New Calamus and Longevity Stone', etc." The influence of Suzhou classical garden art achievements on Suzhou bonsai is also very obvious. To some extent, Suzhou gardens are the model for Suzhou bonsai, and Suzhou bonsai is a condensed Suzhou garden. 
        Suzhou bonsai mainly has two major categories. One is tree-stump bonsai, also called potted bonsai, and the characteristics of Suzhou bonsai are most prominently displayed in this category; the other is mountain-stone bonsai, also called landscape bonsai or mountain-stone bonsai, further divided into water-and-stone bonsai and dry-stone bonsai. Good bonsai is thought-provoking and possesses a beautiful mood, a beautiful pictorial scene, and a beautiful living scene. The inscriptions on bonsai are also the same as those on Chinese paintings, a traditional national style of our country, such as "Hengyun" and "Pan Gui". With just a few words, they can light the lamp in your soul, turning the scene into "poetry", increasing the artistic and ideological quality of the bonsai, and broadening the realm of beauty. Traditional Suzhou-school bonsai forms include favorable wind, weeping branches, split trunk, one crown, six platforms, three supports, and so on. From the above points one can see the process of the Suzhou school from scene selection to modeling. In appreciating bonsai there has long been the saying "first the pot, second the scene, third the stand." Its main characteristics are: first, antique elegance. Tree-stump bonsai made from species such as pine, bamboo, plum, elm, and zelkova shrink natural scenery into an inch and are often the "longevity stars" among trees. Dead trunks and old branches of ten to twenty or even a hundred years of age are carefully cultivated in narrow pots so that they stand no more than a foot above the pot, ancient and rustic yet full of vitality, and paired with purple clay pots, a specialty of the pottery capital Yixing, and various delicate "Suzhou-made" pot stands, they appear even more antique. Second, exquisiteness. Suzhou bonsai making is delicate and refined, ingenious and subtle, as gentle and moving as Jiangnan silk-and-bamboo music. It is exquisite in layout and conception, in spirit and mood, and exquisite within the ancient and rustic. The so-called Chinese painting principle of "boldly putting down the brush, carefully finishing up" is applied in Suzhou bonsai, with both rigorous artistic composition and elegant artistic bearing. Third, meaningful charm. Suzhou bonsai, on the basis of absorbing the essence of our country's traditional classical garden art and combining certain techniques of Chinese landscape painting and flower-and-bird painting, is uniquely created and embodies "silent poetry, three-dimensional painting, living sculpture." Suzhou bonsai art has a natural and simple style, vivid and lively images, unpredictable techniques, and a lingering charm. With its rich breath of life, it strongly moves people, often expressing a primitive and pure natural beauty, intending to call on humanity to love nature and strengthen humanity's awareness of protecting and respecting nature.

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