樹状的形成 Arboreal Formation
Inspired by bonsai.
Since ancient times, there is an art form called bonsai in the East, which embodies the beauty of its structure through trees. A variety of tree shapes represent various characteristics: old carving trunk, elegant straight trunk, strange cascade, and graceful bunjin. Bonsai is a tree while making people think of a human being’s image with a shape that stretches straight up to the sky or a form that undulates to the extreme. To appreciate the bonsai is to enjoy people. People can experience the infinite in various Bonsai. In these works, I attempted to extract such impressions graphically and made the prototype repeatedly to erase the sense of material from drawing.
However, bonsai contains balance, weight, flow, and movement that cannot be depicted in a painting and appeals to the viewer's sense of beauty with a sense of reality. I decomposed the shapes that had been sharpened through drawing and created paper puzzles to form new shapes in three-dimensional space. The word “Sai” in Bonsai means “to plant”. In English, it is translated as “plant” or “grow”. Moreover, we can understand that the act of artificial “planting” makes us feel the meaning of life. To plant is a formative act as an oriental sense that harmonizes with nature, not in opposition to conventional artistic expressions such as drawing as “drawn” or sculpture as “carved”. I wish to focus not only on the result of the paper puzzle but also on the process of assembling and adjusting it by hand. The typological categorization of the tree shapes provides various parts with different forms, generating unpredictable figures accompanying the hand’s senses in the physical laws of gravity and balance and the aesthetic rules of flow and movement.
In this research, I extracted the act of growing and the trees’ shape from bonsai that take decades to grow. I attempted to sublimate them into a new form that embraces the overflowing nature by reconstructing them with paper materials.
