How Wang Shouwei, a Major Bonsai Grower, Grows Bonsai
Wang Shouwei is from Jiulang Village, Zhongming Town, Tongling County, Anhui Province, and is 36 years old this year. Starting in 2001, he gave up the car transport business he had been engaged in for many years to take up the cultivation of flowers, trees and bonsai, and founded the Jiulang Private Bonsai Garden. After seven years of effort, the bonsai garden has grown from small to large, and now has nearly a thousand bonsai of various sizes, including pines and cypresses. Its annual net income is more than 100,000 yuan, and its total value has reached more than 1 million yuan, making it the largest private bonsai garden in the county.
Recently, the author visited Wang Shouwei's bonsai garden.
Walking into the Jiulang Bonsai Garden is like walking into a miniature of nature. On the rooftop and in the courtyard, bonsai of all sizes and shapes are displayed everywhere. Each bonsai is a charming scene in itself, beautifully shaped, vivid and full of life. Behind all this is a great deal of Wang Shouwei's painstaking effort...
In 1986, Wang Shouwei returned home to farm after graduating from junior high school. Later, he went out to work and served as a machinist and an electric welder. Because he had loved root carving since childhood, he began his root carving creations while working. Whenever he had free time, he would search for dead wood, remnant roots and strange branches scattered in the open fields and mountains, and then carefully carve them, turning something rotten into something magical.
In 1992, at the First Tongling Bronze Culture Expo and the Fourth Flower Exhibition, his root art work "Swan Lake" won third prize. In 1993, at the folk craft fine works exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of Chairman Mao's birth, his root carving work "Singing in Spring" was awarded an excellence prize; in the same year, at the Fifth Tongling Flower Exhibition in China, another of his works, "The Man of Qi Who Worried That the Sky Would Fall", was awarded second prize.
After becoming wealthy, Wang Shouwei also took the initiative to help other bonsai growers, teaching them bonsai-making techniques hand by hand. Under his influence and guidance, dozens of farming households in Zhongming Town began to engage in the bonsai business, and in Jiulang Village alone more than 10 households founded private bonsai gardens. The bonsai business has also become a characteristic industry and leading industry of the village. In 2006, Wang Shouwei was also named a city-level leader in rural prosperity.
Bonsai is a high-level art form appreciated by both refined and popular tastes, and is known as "silent poetry and three-dimensional painting". Speaking about his own bonsai creations, Wang Shouwei told the author that developing bonsai, advancing the industry, prospering the market and invigorating the economy are the aims. In order to make the bonsai industry bigger and stronger, he has now invested more than 100,000 yuan to buy a batch of precious tree species such as high-mountain pines and cypresses from the Dabie Mountains for introduction and cultivation, making new contributions to the development of Tongling's bonsai industry.
He truly began to set his sights on the then newly emerging bonsai industry in 2000. He spent 20,000 yuan to buy a batch of tree stumps and hired a person specifically to manage them, while he himself still ran transport. However, because the person he hired did not know how to cultivate them, and because he himself was also a novice at making bonsai, in less than half a year more than half of the bonsai he had bought died. This time he lost more than 10,000 yuan.
The first failure did not defeat Wang Shouwei. The next year, he gave up the transport business, sold his car, and began to devote himself to studying bonsai making. In order to raise the survival rate of tree stumps to more than 90%, in addition to learning from books, he also went to great lengths to consult seniors in the flower, tree and bonsai field. Through diligent effort, the survival rate of the tree stumps reached the desired target, and the bonsai he made began to gain some fame. In 2003, he sold one bonsai to a boss from Suzhou for the high price of 14,000 yuan, which was the best price Wang Shouwei had ever gotten in his bonsai-making career.
However, when leaving, this Suzhou boss said to Wang Shouwei: "Xiao Wang, I think you are a good person, honest and sincere. To be frank with you, with just a bit of technical processing after I get back, I can resell this bonsai for more than 200,000 yuan." These words struck Wang Shouwei like a blow to the head and woke him up: the value of bonsai depends crucially on technique.
How could he improve his own bonsai-making technique? Wang Shouwei thought of taking a master to learn the craft. In 2004, he specifically went to Hefei to study under a senior artist engaged in bonsai, traveling north and south to make bonsai and painstakingly honing his skills. Today, the pine and cypress bonsai made by Wang Shouwei not only have a certain influence in the Tongling area, but are also somewhat well known in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang region. Their main characteristic is the combination of nature and artifice, drawing on the strengths of many, applying skills according to the material, and taking the form according to the tree. On the basis of inheriting tradition, he constantly innovates, blending majesty, elegance, natural ease and brightness into one, expressing a simple and natural local style, while also displaying the look of Tongling bonsai and possessing a certain local character.