Hey Vance I agree with your major premise that to be an accomplished artist one needs to understand the body of work that developed prior to one’s appearance on the scene. Like they say in court “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” So learn the bonsai rules before you break them.
An even more basic point is the rules of bonsai have nothing to do with Japan. The rules of bonsai design have to do with the fundamental being of nature and esthetics. For example, the placement of a tree in pot, the height and spacing of branches, the thickness of the tree to trunk, and placement of branches around the trunk all boil down to the natural prevalence of the “Golden Mean” or phi, in design. I won’t go into the math here but the Golden Mean is fundamental to nature and to design no matter what culture (The ancient Greeks used it to design temples, the Chinese designed the ornamentation and doors of the Great Wall using it, even African tribal art uses the ratio, and of course it abounds in nature.) Humans are used to seeing the Golden Mean and design using its proportions looks right. Another driving force behind bonsai rule is the concept of selective compression - how to convey the image of a tree in a compressed package. Perspective is another rule that leads to taper and trunk lean. These rules are culturally irrelevant.
Vance Wood wrote:
So in essence the art has not been re-invented but evolved, broadened, and freed up from the binding of a singular cultural point of view.
Bonsai never truly had a single cultural point of view. The historical fact that a Japanese author penned the first English book on bonsai rules does not make the rules Japanese any more so then if I was to write the rules of bonsai in pig latin they would be my rules to people that speak pig latin. There was/is plenty of bonsai knowledge and lore in other Asian countries, especially China. There are quite a few rules and techniques that never made it to Japan – for example the fiber training of branches into extremely flat pads. Cultural agnosticism of the rules implies a bonsai practitioner can be successful and never refer to Japan.
The styles of bonsai on the other hand can have a regional bias. The trees in Japan grew a certain way that led to the Japanese predilection for their styles. Yet the globalization of bonsai has clearly proven that the Japanese styles only represent a portion of the possible bonsai styles.
Finally just like Copernicus’ heliocentric theory has been displaced by modern cosmology and the Big Bang theory, the rules of bonsai may become obviated by some new discovery that places everything in some unified concept, totally different from what we believe is true today. Like Einstein one needs to keep an open mind.