bonsai with snails
bonsai with toad
bonsai with hawk moth
bonsai with centipede
bonsai with dobsonfly
Properly cultivated, bonsai specimens mimic, in every way, their full size parents. Paradoxically, they are both ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, nature and culture, object and image. In Japan bonsai masters are venerated as artists, duly credited with the authorship of their individual creations. As in the series unnatural histories, these photographs depict their subject at night. The series was inspired by observing a moth landing on a bonsai tree displayed in a palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing.