Literati style (Bunjin), love it or hate it, is part of the art. The origins are attributed to bonsai artists attempting to emulate the style of painted trees depicted in the artworks of those exiled senior civil servants of the various government agencies of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), roughly the period we call the Middle Ages, in Europe.
I have often heard this stated as fact and wondered whether there is not another reason behind the style. I was fortunate enough to visit China a few years ago, during summer. In some of the more rural areas I saw trees that were almost perfect exemplars of the literati style. Not necessarily transformed by hardship and repeated snows, these thin, weakened, graceful trees nonetheless possessed small, almost insignificant crowns and the great numbers of jins and areas of stripped bark that we associate with the style.
The reason, according to my Chinese-born Australian Guide, when she asked the locals? Firewood gathering, by peasants who had torn branches from the trees, often stripping long skeins of bark from the trees as they did so.
Perhaps the "learned scholars" were merely painting what they saw?
Yes, there is a minimalist tradition in the painted art of both Japan and China, but surely that doesn't preclude the power of surroundings to influence artistic rendition of landscapes.
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