LotusBonsaiStudio

Bienvenue à Lotus Bonsai Studio - home of one-of-a-kind handmade Chinese bonsai clay figures and pottery, bonsai & penjing compositions, clay sculptures, Chinese stone seals and paintings by French-Vietnamese artist Lam Son Giang.

The Artist
Heir to a tradition of Penjing and trained as an aquaculture engineer, French-Vietnamese artist Lam Son Giang has been specializing in training Bonsai techniques from seedlings, cuttings, layering to grafting for more than 22 years in France.

Currently, Giang is focusing on his main activity of creating unglazed figures or mudmen bonsai figures, another art associated to Bonsai-penjing for over 1400 years. The figures are made in stoneware clay and baked between 1000°C and 1250°C.

The History
The ancient art of earthenware figures is always linked to that of pottery. With their ancestral know-how the ceramic artists of Shiwan, a small town in southern China, have been making expressive and realistic figurines since the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) to the present day by combining the techniques of sculpture and pottery.

The "Bonsai-penjing" clay figures, known as “mud men” or “mud figures” in the Western world, are from the literal translation of the Chinese “ni- ren, 泥-人” (mud-man). These are between 1 and 20 cm high. They are generally divided into three categories: popular characters (historical, mythical, religious, etc.), daily life (houses, bridges, boats, etc.) or animals (cranes, buffaloes, goats, etc.) They can be of glazed or unglazed earthenware.

The Meaning and Usage
These mud figures have been always present in the old Chinese Penjing tradition. Just like the arts of calligraphy, poetry and painting, the composition of Penjing allows the artist to send a message, to express an idea or a thought. (Read more: http://ofbonsai.org/artistic/pottery-artistic/bonsai-penjing-associated-art-history-of-mud-figure-or-‘ni-ren’-accent-figures)