Bonsai Creation Techniques: How to Achieve the Mutual Generation of Virtual and Real, and an Artful Balance of Spacing and Density

  The so-called virtual and real refers to the relationship between fullness and emptiness, sparseness and density. If it is stuffed too full, it appears clumsy, bloated and jumbled, making one feel suffocated. Therefore, there must be an artful balance of spacing and density and a suitable harmony of virtual and real; for example, where there is one dense area, there must be one sparse area to let its qi breathe. But it should not be too sparse or too empty, lest the various elements in the pot lose connection and fail to complement one another, causing the flow of energy to become discontinuous. When handling the relationships among the various parts of a bonsai, there must be distinctions between virtual and real and between sparse and dense; when handling a particular part, there must also be virtual within real, real within virtual, sparse within dense, and dense within sparse. Therefore, virtual and real are also issues of vital importance in the art of bonsai.

  As for the virtual, it can be understood as emptiness and substantiality, or nonbeing and being; as for the real, it can be understood as the virtual realm and the real realm. The so-called real realm refers to the visible images in the bonsai; while the virtual realm is the image generated from the real realm through association and imagination. The artistic conception of a bonsai is the expression of the unity of the real realm and the virtual realm. As a work of art, without the active imagination of the appreciator, it has no life. An excellent bonsai work can make the viewer's spirit wander; this wandering is the virtual. Therefore, virtual and real are a unity of opposites. Yet the virtual always relies on a certain real; without the real, the virtual cannot exist; and the real cannot be separated from the supplement of the virtual; without the virtual, there is no room for imagination. Therefore, a work of art must have both virtual and real.

  In bonsai, the shaping of scenery is not the final purpose, but a means of expressing emotion through scenery; there must be both a sense of the real and a sense of the virtual. Bonsai itself is “virtual,” because it expresses natural scenery, but after all it is not the same as real natural scenery. As an artistic technique, the relationship between virtual and real includes cases where mutual fulfillment lies in the virtual and arouses a real feeling in the viewer, and cases where it is based on the real and arouses a virtual feeling in the viewer; this is the so-called “the virtual is made real, the real is made virtual,” “within the real there is the virtual, both real and virtual; the virtual emerges from the real, and the bare virtual is also real,” ultimately achieving “virtual and real generate each other” and “transforming scenery into emotion and thought,” forming the artistic conception of the work.

  The understanding of the relationship between virtual and real in the creation and appreciation of artistic conception has a long intellectual origin and a solid basis in artistic creation. The universe itself is a combination of virtual and real; objective things themselves are combinations of yin and yang, virtual and real. Since the art of bonsai must truly and vividly reflect the living world, it must employ the inherent dialectic of the mutual generation of virtual and real. Artists throughout China's dynasties followed this principle and created countless artistic treasures. In tree-stump bonsai, the relationship between virtual and real is mainly embodied in the branches and leaves versus the trunk, the tree versus space, the tree versus the soil in the pot, and the exposed roots of the tree. Generally, space is virtual, the trunk is real; branches and leaves are virtual relative to the trunk, but real relative to space. In the arrangement of branches, leaves, and the plant, sparse areas are virtual and dense, clustered areas are real. Therefore, pruning, wiring and bending, carving, and selecting the pot and layout can be used to adjust the relationship between virtual and real, so as to achieve the mutual generation of virtual and real.

  In landscape bonsai, as far as mountains and water are concerned, mountains are real and water is virtual; mountains encircle water, water winds around mountains; the combination of mountains and water is also the combination of virtual and real. Through the layout of rocks, the shoreline, and the treatment of caves, flowing springs, waterfalls, and so on, one can help virtual and real generate each other. If we speak of mountains and trees, then mountains are real and trees are virtual; trees and rocks rely on each other, so there is both virtual and real. As for the mountains themselves, peaks, ridges, hills, and valleys are real, while gullies, ravines, streams, and caves are virtual; handling the relationship between these two aspects is important. Trees are virtual relative to rocks, but real relative to the water surface and space. Therefore, when shaping, if the water and rocks are too virtual, small reefs can be added or a small boat or small bridge can be dotted in; if the rocks are too real, caves and gullies can be pierced and trees planted; springs and waterfalls can be introduced, so as to achieve “within the real there is the virtual.”

  Bonsai is precisely an artistic generalization and artistic reproduction of famous mountains and great rivers and ancient, extraordinary trees. To create bonsai, the most important thing is to have hills, valleys, forests, and springs in one's heart, and only then can there be “generalization” and “reproduction.” Learning from nature and taking nature as one's teacher is an important task in collecting material and a prerequisite for creation. Of course, since it is creation, it is not a direct copying or transcription of natural scenery, not a mirror-like “miniature,” but a combination of realism and romanticism. How can a thousand li of mountains all be extraordinary? How can ten thousand li of water all be beautiful?

  In bonsai creation, one must carefully observe and study mountains, rivers, and towering ancient trees, and conscientiously carry out a process of artistic refinement through pruning, selection and rejection, rendering, and exaggeration, so as to reproduce nature in a more concentrated and more typical way. Toward nature, poets, painters, and artists of past dynasties have all endlessly praised and worshipped it, drawing nourishment from nature to enrich their own creation. Bonsai practitioners, too, must spare no effort, climb mountains and wade through waters, conduct in-depth study of mountains, water, and trees, grasp their characteristics, and master their laws. Mountains may be secluded, elegant, perilous, majestic, or extraordinary; trees may be vigorous and unrestrained, or graceful and free. One must be wholly attentive and capture their characteristics. And for each characteristic, one must also notice subtle differences, searching out all extraordinary peaks to draft the mental composition.

  In nature are deeply hidden inexhaustible and endlessly useful materials for the art of bonsai, but we need to excavate and collect them so as to avoid rigidity and cliché, and thereby create works with novel conception, beautiful composition, pleasing color, and artistic charm. Someone had this experience: “From Jiangling I ascended the Three Gorges and Kuimen, with a long stretch of more than three thousand li…… swirling eddies and returning currents, majestic waves and swift rapids were all there…… overhanging cliffs and sheer precipices, steep banks and high winds, lofty ridges and deep rocks, secluded springs and beautiful valleys, tiger dens and dragon pools, the strange, the perilous, the towering and steep, sudden rain and wild wind, all were experienced…… truly what is called taking something from a bag.

  ”Many bonsai technicians do not have a high level of education, yet they can create fine works with considerable artistic conception and both spirit and form, precisely because they have worked hard at observing nature and at “traveling ten thousand li.” Of course, emphasizing traveling ten thousand li and having hills and valleys in the heart does not deny reading ten thousand books and storing poetry and learning within, but rather requires clarifying the root and source, and not treating learning from nature as the root and source. If the root and branch are reversed, the artistic source of bonsai will dry up.

  How should one learn from nature, and what should one learn? To learn from nature is to grasp the characteristics, properties, expressions, and postures of various things, and to grasp the regularity of things. Nothing in nature lacks a certain regularity. Trees have the laws of growth, development, flowering, fruiting, leaf fall, and dormancy; mountains have the laws of change through spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and through morning and evening, clear and rainy. As for plants, each has different botanical forms and biological characteristics, with extraordinary postures and unusual forms, changing in countless ways, such as bamboo's firm joints and elegance, the pine's verdant vigor, the fragrant charm of osmanthus, and the charm of crabapple, each with its own characteristics.

  Take elegance and refinement, for example: there are distinctions among ancient elegance, graceful elegance, and quiet elegance, and people have further divided elegance into five categories: “Plain and natural, without the slightest trace of affectation, is high elegance; with method in composition and foundation in brushwork, changing to the utmost yet never departing from the rules of change, is classic elegance; sparse trees on the plain, cold sand by distant peaks, faint distant ridges, brimming autumn waters, with few brushstrokes yet the more one plays with it the more inexhaustible it becomes, is subtle elegance; with a calm spirit and quiet qi, making one suddenly dispel restless and reckless qi, is harmonious elegance; able to gather the strengths of all the ancients and form a style of one's own, while still not losing the qi of famous and precious scrolls, is great elegance.” In short, the more meticulously one observes things, the more freely one can act in creation, “shaping according to the object,” and “applying color according to category,” so that the work reaches “formal likeness” and “spiritual likeness,” possessing a vivid and moving artistic conception.

  The so-called formal likeness refers to an artistic image reflecting the appearance of an objective thing vividly and truthfully; the so-called spiritual likeness refers to expressing the vivid and distinct expression, condition, and unique individuality of a thing. Form is the foundation; without formal likeness, spiritual likeness cannot be discussed. But if one is rigidly bound to formal likeness and pursues the partial truth of external form, one cannot highlight the spiritual temperament and individual characteristics of the object. Here, spirit is the key; formal likeness is for conveying spirit; form and spirit must both be present, and neither can be missing. Because the art of bonsai is limited by objective conditions such as materials and forms of expression, it is affected to a certain degree in realism; if one pursues strict formal likeness, one often instead loses truth, especially since the ultimate purpose of bonsai art is to express artistic conception.

  To express feeling, only by having both form and spirit can this purpose be achieved. The aesthetic requirement of both form and spirit is “likeness that is not likeness.” Our emphasis that bonsai should conform to nature does not mean becoming a model of natural scenery. For bonsai to “shrink the dragon to an inch” and “shrink the land to a thousand li,” achieving “one peak then roughly a thousand xun, one ladle then rivers and lakes for ten thousand li,” it must generalize, condense, and concentrate, and therefore cannot be completely formally alike. Compared with the natural scenery being expressed, the scenery in a bonsai may not be fully alike in form, yet it is similar in spirit; moreover, only when form is not fully alike can spiritual likeness be achieved; too much formal likeness instead loses spiritual resonance.

  In bonsai creation, to achieve both form and spirit, one must begin from every aspect. First, one must have a full understanding of the object to be expressed. In order to highlight spirit, when choosing the object to express, one should appropriately generalize and select or reject the form; sometimes it is enough to choose only “a single scale and half a claw,” that is, seeking simplicity within complexity. When processing and making, for plants, rocks, and so on, one must apply techniques according to the material, so as to make full use of its inherent form to express a kind of natural spiritual resonance.

  In layout and selection of form, one must flexibly apply the relationship between form and spirit, seeking to achieve perfection of image, so that viewers are stirred emotionally, produce associations, and resonate. This constitutes a profound artistic conception, and artistic conception is the blending of feeling and scenery. Moreover, every blade of grass and every tree, every mountain and every stream in the pot is infused with the author's subjective feelings and crystallizes the author's thoughts and emotions, producing infinite associations from limited scenery. For example, if the stump and trunk are robust, rugged, and with twisting roots, then shape it into a large-tree type or old banyan type; if the head and roots are smooth and the trunk leans to one side, shape it into a slanting tree type; if the trunk is tall and straight, piercing the sky, then shape it into a kapok tree type, and so on. The finished work is required to have a form that conforms to nature, so that every form has its own individuality and characteristics, possessing both natural beauty and artistic beauty, achieving the creative purpose of “originating from nature and surpassing nature.”