Exhibits

CURRENTLY ON VIEW

World War Bonsai: Remembrance & Resilience

Pacific Bonsai Museum’s special exhibition for 2020 and 2021, World War Bonsai: Remembrance & Resilience, traces the cultural practice of bonsai in location and time—in Japan and in the United States, from the pre-war WWII period, through wartime, amid incarceration, and at peace. With bonsai, artifacts, documents, and photographs, the exhibition shares the little-known stories of the people who ingeniously and courageously cared for bonsai, shared their art, and spurred a flourishing, global practice despite overwhelming hardships. Exhibition on view now through October 2021.

Watch

Video Introduction

Watch a short video introducing the exhibition with Curator’s voiceover.

Film by Bonsai Mirai

Watch a short film featuring Curator Aarin Packard and featured exhibit artist, Erin Shigaki.

Video Documentation

If you can’t make it into the Museum, Momiji-en En Bonsai & Garden has kindly documented the whole exhibition for you. Watch on YouTube.

Photos from the Exhibition

Bristlecone Pine

Alcove depicting the scene when 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced to board trains and travel to live in barbed-wire detention camps displayed with a Bristlecone Pine (Pinus aristata) bonsai originally created by Kelly Hiromo Nishitani.

“…A dead tree may be as arresting, as filled with personality in death, as it is in life” -Edwin Way Teale

A dead Eastern White Cedar (Thuja occidentalis) bonsai opens the exhibition as a memorial to the millions of lives lost during World War II.

Furuzawa Pine

The Japanese Black Pine bonsai grown from seed by Japanese American Juzaburo Furuzawa while he was incarcerated in a barbed-wire detention camp during World War II.

Art installation by Erin Shigaki (partial)

Read & Learn

View sample pages and purchase the exhibition catalog.

View a PDF listing suggested sources of further information on topics presented in this exhibition.

Take a virtual tour or a virtual field trip.

FOLSE: a retrospective

What grounds and connects you to the things that are most important in your life? For artist Roland Folse, it is certainly bonsai. Having practiced for 60 years, Folse’s deep relationship to the art of bonsai has made it inseparable from everything that matters most to him: family, community, exploration, and nature.

A fateful meeting with Seattle bonsai master Kelly Nishitani, was followed by a life-long, healthy obsession with bonsai and many of its associated arts. Folse has spent much of his life crafting raw material into expressive art; plants trained into bonsai, clay shaped into ceramic vessels, wood carved and constructed into display stands, and paint mixed to conjure images of the environments and trees that inspired him.

In September 2020, Roland Folse donated 20 bonsai from his personal collection to us: some to add to the Museum’s collection and others to sell in support of the collection. To recognize Roland’s generosity and his lifetime of achievement in American bonsai, we have created a small exhibition of bonsai Roland created so we can share his life story with you. We hope that the exhibition will inspire you to follow your own passions and creative pursuits.

FOLSE: a retrospective on view at Pacific Bonsai Museum May 29 through August 28, 2021.