​


Abuse and Control
​
Shen Shaomin’s Bonsai series

Picture
image © designboom
I think that the process of bonsai-making is basically the abuse of plants. You grow a sapling, then twist it to make it grow into artificial shapes. Despite the whole deforming process being extremely cruel, people find the bonsai beautiful.

​- Shen Shaomin, quoted in Plyler (below)
While I looked through “Grafting Operation Manual,” I began to question the ethics of treating a living organism in this way. The trees are cut, burned, and flayed. Even as I cringed at the mutilation of the bonsai, I recognized the hypocrisy in selective sympathy towards living organisms, an ideal underlying Shaomin’s book. This manual was created to be a part of Shen’s art installation titled Bonsai.

​The cognitive leap from bonsai training to the mutilation of human bodies is precisely the one Shen Shaomin hopes we will make. Shen conceptualized the series while looking at x-rays of women’s feet subjected to Chinese foot binding. In this installation he presents bonsai that have been twisted and marred, like the bones of a bound foot. They are in the grip of large metal clamps and scaffolding, which both restrict the plant’s growth and become a support structure necessary for the plant’s survival. 

- Elise Plyler, “The Abuse of Plants:” Shen Shaomin’s “Grafting Operation Diagram,' ” Th John Bale Book Company, click here

“Bonsai reveals an introspective look on the notion of ‘control.’ Control can take place in the abuse of the physical body, like foot binding or bonsai, and it can also be performed through a distortion of intellect and psychology, such as training children to become filial sons, faithful wives, and ‘war heroes.’ 

—Wu Hung, Artron.net, translated by Peggy Wang


​The Bonsai Series
​

​Description & Concept

  • Shen Shaomin’s Bonsai series (circa 2007–2009) treats bonsai trees as “living installations” manipulated with wires, cages, pulleys, clamps, and other iron tools so that they look twisted, constrained, coerced. Eli Klein Gallery+3Designboom+3Vermilion Art+3​
  • Rather than hiding the process, Shen makes the techniques explicit. Accompanying texts, diagrams, or “manuals” (like his Grafting Operation Diagram) document not only how bonsai shaping is done, but exaggerate or push methods toward extremes — skinning bark, cauterization, ant-nibbling (smearing honey so ants nibble), etc. The John Bale Book Company+2Designboom+2
  • The series is often read as a critique or metaphor: the way humans impose unnatural order on nature, the hidden violence behind “beauty” or “control,” even parallels to human practices like foot binding. Vermilion Art+4Eli Klein Gallery+4Informit+4
  • Shen has explicitly said that bonsai-making is “basically the abuse of plants” — bending a sapling to human desires is cruel, even if the result is “beautiful.” Wikipedia+2The John Bale Book Company+2
  • In one of his exhibitions (“Distortion,” for instance), Shen also created bonsai ink paintings on silk, rendered in a more traditional style but with subject matter of tortured trees. Eli Klein Gallery
​Key Works & Exhibitions
​
  • On the Eli Klein Gallery site, some examples are listed: Bonsai-no.40 (2007), Bonsai-no.45 (2007), Bonsai-no.44 (2007), Bonsai-no.39 (2007), Bonsai-no.48 (2007) — all using plant + iron tools. Eli Klein Gallery
  • The Bonsai series was shown as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). Designboom+2Informit+2
  • For Project No.1, Shen connects his bonsai work to broader cultural systems, including the “Chinese art of penjing / bonsai” and the symbolic weight of traditional constructs (like architectural or political structures). Osage Publications
​Interpretation & Significance
​
  • By making visible the instruments of control, the Bonsai series forces us to acknowledge that even in aesthetic practices, there is a hidden “violence of shaping.”
  • The series blurs the boundary between living organism and manipulated object, asking: when a tree is forced into human desires, where do you draw the line between care and coercion?
  • Shen draws analogy to human practices: foot binding, body modification, social control — the same impulse to remodel an organism to a desired (often subservient) form. Informit+3The John Bale Book Company+3Eli Klein Gallery+3
  • It also serves as a critique of human hubris: our belief that nature exists to be tamed, reformed, beautified — and that the “natural” can in fact be more brutal than we like to admit.



​Shen Shaomin
​

​Biography & Background
​
​Key Themes & Artistic Approach

Shen’s work often probes challenging and provocative ideas. Some of his recurring interests:
​
  • Human nature, control, mortality, and artificial intervention: He interrogates how humans manipulate nature and life, and the consequences of scientific/technological ambition. White Rabbit Gallery+3Eli Klein Gallery+3Artsy+3
  • Assemblage and hybridity: He often works with animal bones from slaughterhouses to assemble "imagined creatures" that do not correspond to a single species—hybrid skeletons that evoke extinct or fantastical beings. Zemack Contemporary Art+3Artsy+3White Rabbit Gallery+3
  • “Unknown Creatures” series: This is one of his signature works. In that series, he collects bones, breaks associations with their original forms, and reconfigures them into new, ambiguous skeletal entities to provoke reflection on life, death, taxonomy, and scientific authority. White Rabbit Gallery+3Wikipedia+3Artsy+3
  • Botanical / vegetal manipulations (e.g. bonsai series): He also produced a series in which he treated plants in ways that suggest coercion or control (using wires, pulleys, cages), drawing parallels with human attempts to domineer over living systems. Wikipedia
  • “I Sleep on Top of Myself” series: Sculptural works where hyperreal, skinned animals lie on their own fur/wool/feathers, often with mechanical breathing systems, laid on salt mounds—this evokes tension between life, death, vulnerability, and simulation. Wikipedia+1
  • Political, social, and spatial critique: Some projects engage with notions of power, architecture, propaganda, and national symbolism. For example, his “Project No.1” attempted a re-design of the Tiananmen gate with exaggerated scale to comment on extravagance, visibility, national ideals, and social inequalities. Wikipedia+1
​Notable Works & Exhibitions
​
  • Fighter X: A work based on a found blueprint of a military aircraft, reinterpreted to expose the machinery, dream & horror of weaponry. Wikipedia+1
  • I Touched the Voice of God: An installation project involving rocket parts and symbols, also exploring perception, language, and the cosmic. Eli Klein Gallery+1
  • Multiple solo exhibitions include “The Day After Tomorrow” (Sydney, 2011), “There Is No Problem” (Guangzhou) and “So What, Breeze” (Beijing) among others. Eli Klein Gallery+2Zemack Contemporary Art+2
  • He has participated in various international biennials and group exhibitions (Shanghai Biennale, Guangzhou Triennial, Busan Biennale, etc.). Eli Klein Gallery+1


Ecological Civilization

beauty without cruelty
​

Process philosophers distinguish between two kinds of power: unilateral and relational. Unilateral power is coercive. It forces itself upon its object—whether a person, a piece of land, an animal, or a plant—driving it toward pre-designed ends and remaining indifferent to the suffering caused.Relational power, by contrast, is persuasive and cooperative. It shapes and is shaped in return, open to influence from a plant, an animal, another person, or the earth itself.

Shen Shaomin’s Bonsai series offers a haunting counter-image: what happens when coercive power is pushed to its extreme. In these works, trees are bent, twisted, and shackled into human designs. To some, the outcome may appear beautiful. Yet behind the beauty is a cruelty—an aesthetic born of domination, exposing the violence hidden in practices of control, whether directed at nature or at human bodies.

The series provokes us to ask questions we might not otherwise face. Can we, in fact, be cruel to plants? How is cruelty to plants bound up with cruelty to people? When does shaping life for aesthetic or practical purposes cross the line into violation? Do we deceive ourselves by calling something “beautiful” when its beauty masks hidden violence? And perhaps most troubling of all: have we grown so accustomed to domination that we no longer recognize it, even when it stands before us in such stark form?

These questions also catalyze us to wonder—and to hope—whether we might live in a different way: prioritizing relational over coercive power, cooperation over control, respect over domination. This is the vision of an ecological civilization. It lifts up relational power as a preferable way of life, suggesting that human beings can live with the more-than-human world, and with one another, shaping relationships that are mutually enhancing rather than coercive. It also emphasizes that we can live relationally with one another—in a spirit of kindness, respect, and mutual care. At its heart, the vision is one of living Earth communities—urban and rural places where people live with reverence for the larger community of life, and for one another, and where no one is left behind. 

Of course, this vision is aspirational. An ecological civilization in which there is perfect harmony is a utopian dream. But human beings live by ideals, and we rightly strive to approximate them. The Bonsai series provokes us in just this direction. It presents a negative example--cruelty disguised as beauty—so that we might seek a positive alternative: beauty without cruelty.

Chat GPT (with prompts from Jay McDaniel)


Open Horizons