Screenprint
100 x 70 cm
Edition of 5

The Bonsai series was made after the artist spent time in Japan in 2011. The series is composed of different photographs, all extracts from the homonym book. All the images in the publication are reproductions taken from a Japanese book on Bonsai trees, which the artist re-photographed and turned into negatives. This work deals with the long and characteristic tradition of an Eastern country, seen and revisited from a Western point of view; a point of view which has long been fascinated with the exotic and the decorative.

With a mutual focus on trees, the Bonsai series can also be read as a formal sequel, or counterpart, to his earlier work: Der Baum. Yet the formal qualities of the two series diverge; in Bonsai, the inverted image becomes an object, as opposed to the photographing of a subject in Der Baum.