Bonsai Goblins
Held October 4 through October 29, 2003
Note from the Curator
The idea for this exhibit came about as the result of ruminations and discussions about the history and nature of bonsai as art.
It is general practice, in contemporary bonsai design, to create works that are representational in nature; that is, the bonsai is designed to create an image of a mature, sometimes dramatically formed tree in a natural environment. The viewer is thus transported to a time and place beyond the small plant, just as the viewer of a landscape painting enters a world of imagery beyond a bit of paint on canvas.
A painter can render a scene in considerable completeness and accuracy, as realist painters typically do. An impressionist painter, on the other hand, will create a somewhat more abstracted image, eschewing detail and photo-like rendering in order to capture a fleeting moment of light or activity. Bold brush strokes and exaggerated colors can help express the artist's emotional reaction to a scene, whereas perfect rendering might seem studied or cold.
Bonsai have more in common with impressionism than realism, in that the plant itself presents problems of scale, size of leaves, number of branches, etc. Also, bonsai artists typically choose an idealized image over a literal image by omitting some features and exaggerating others. The result is a suggestion of a tree or scene rather than a realistic rendering. Since even "naturalistic" or "representational" bonsai are somewhat abstracted images, it should not be surprising that the transition to abstract design is really just a matter of degree.
Abstraction in bonsai has taken many forms. Late 19th-century Japanese styles were based on landscape paintings rather than natural trees. Contemporary designs may focus on swirling lines, textural complexity, and asymmetrical balance rather than any kind of representation at all.
Abstraction in Chinese bonsai or penjing has traditionally appeared in a different form. Chinese artists as a group embraced abstraction in their penjing, and some old traditional styles were based not on natural tree images at all, but on the shape of a written character or a concept of spiritual advancement. They even allowed a bit of whimsy into their work, with trees shaped to suggest the serpentine lines of a "Dancing Dragon." Anthropomorphism in bonsai-the shaping of a plant so that it suggests a human or animal form-has been a small part of the Chinese aesthetic for centuries. Never seen in Japanese bonsai, and rarely if ever in non-Asian countries, bonsai anthropomorphism of a more contemporary sort made an appearance more than a decade ago in a small Massachusetts town.
Artist Nick Lenz works with both plant material and clay. As a sculptor and potter, he does not feel constrained to create works that are representational, and he has applied this free approach to bonsai design as well. Most of Nick's trees are in fact representational, trained meticulously into traditional designs. Occasionally, however, his "dark side" exerts itself, anthropomorphism appears, and normally benevolent trees suddenly become as willing to consume people as we are to consume them.
Nick's bonsai don't do their stalking alone; they consort with a variety of suspicious objects and malevolent creatures fashioned from stone, wood, clay, and found objects. The results, as you will see, are sometimes elegant, often humorous, and occasionally discomforting. In all cases, they demonstrate the searching curiosity, vivid imagination, and striking originality of a weirdly brilliant mind.
David De Groot, Curator
View the Bonsai Goblins exhibit
