What principles should be followed in bonsai design?

  Some say that the aesthetic characteristics of Chinese bonsai art lie in “seeking elegance and rising above the conventional,” with an emphasis on subtlety and artistic conception, on using the solid to set off the void and combining the solid with the void, and on layers and depth of scene, so as to achieve “turning the finite into the infinite” and “turning the bounded into the unbounded,” captivating the viewer, stirring the imagination, and leaving an endless aftertaste, and so on.

  But to sum it up more concisely, the aesthetic characteristics of Chinese bonsai art are, first, seeing the large in the small, that is, famous mountains and great rivers or ancient trees and famous flowers are all contained within a single pot, using superb artistic techniques to evoke nature, and second, maintaining their vitality, with living, breathing life infused into them.

  Bonsai is by no means a reduced-scale model of nature, and this is true whether it is landscape bonsai, tree-stump bonsai, or even flowers. In landscape bonsai, a small pot can produce the wonder of Huangshan, the grandeur of Taishan, the steepness of Huashan, and the elegance of Emei, but it is by no means a model of them; rather, through such things as stones, water, and trees, it lets people intuitively grasp their respective characteristics. The same is true of tree-stump bonsai: whether ancient pines and rare cypresses, or plum stumps and banyan trees, all can display dignified and graceful postures in a small bonsai. Bonsai should be alive and growing.

  Bonsai design should follow the principles in the following four aspects:

  1. The principle of contrast and harmony. In plant landscape design, tree shape, color, lines, texture, proportion, and so on must all have a certain degree of difference and variation, showing the diversity of the plants; at the same time, a certain similarity must be maintained to form a sense of unity, so that it is both lively and harmonious and unified. In design, the technique of contrast is often used to highlight the theme.

  2. The principle of balance and stability. On the plane, an appropriate expression of the relationship of lightness and heaviness is balance; on the vertical plane, an appropriate expression of the relationship of lightness and heaviness is stability.

  3. The principle of rhythm and cadence. The regular repetition of individual plants in plant arrangement, with variation at intervals, produces cadence in the repetition of sequence and produces rhythm in the variation of cadence.

  4. The principle of proportion and scale. Proportion refers to the appropriate relationship in size among the scenery elements in a garden, including both the proportional relationships of length, width, and height among the parts of the scenery itself, and the proportional relationships among scenery elements and between the individual and the whole.