How to appreciate the picturesque beauty of tree bonsai

Although the forms of Chinese bonsai draw their material from natural landscapes and trees, they are not a mechanical imitation of a specific blade of grass, a single tree, a single mountain or a single stream; rather, they highly generalize and distill the scenery of nature's mountains, waters and trees and subject it to artistic processing, turning it into a varied yet unified composition with primary and secondary elements, with setting off, with gathering and scattering, with sparseness and density, with contrast and with echoing, striving to reach an artistic realm that condenses the scenery of nature. The beauty produced after this scenery of nature has undergone artistic processing is the beauty of pictorial imagery.

The beauty of pictorial imagery is an important aspect of bonsai beauty, and when judging whether the formative art of a bonsai is good or bad, the beauty of pictorial imagery is usually taken as one of the criteria. The pictorial imagery beauty of a bonsai can be expressed through different formal styles. Chinese bonsai has a great variety of formal styles and schools of style. Mastering this aesthetic knowledge helps one appreciate the pictorial imagery beauty of bonsai.

To express the beauty of pictorial imagery, various artistic techniques must be used, such as clearly distinguishing primary from secondary, achieving proper sparseness and density, producing mutual generation of the void and the solid, using the ingenious and the clumsy together, revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary, and having concealment within exposure, and so on. It must also be realized through certain technical methods, such as the cultivation and pruning of trees, the wiring and shaping of trees, and the carving, arrangement and joining of mountain stones, and so on. Therefore, in order to further understand the pictorial imagery beauty of bonsai, it is best to have some understanding of the relevant artistic techniques and technical methods.