A bonsai is not a small tree. It is a full-sized tree kept small by a century of decisions, and the specimens drawn here carry that history: some of those in the Kyoto gardens the design comes from have been tended for three hundred and fifty years. Bonsai Garden sets a selection of them out across a panel, each given its own ground rather than absorbed into a repeat.
That is the difference between this and a conventional chinoiserie. The tradition usually fills a wall with a continuous landscape; here the composition is closer to a procession of portraits, with space between the trees and a distant skyline behind them. You read it by moving along it, tree by tree, which is very close to how the gardens themselves are meant to be walked.
It is supplied as a panel measuring 210 cm wide by 3.5 m high, printed on a non-woven ground and hung as a straight match. Because it is composed rather than repeated, it wants a wall it can occupy completely: behind a bed, along the length of a dining room, at the head of a stair. Everything else in the room should be plain, and the lighting should be even rather than dramatic.
