Talk:Bonkei

message: Just a quick note to say that a couple of recent additions to the article appear to refer to bonseki, a related but visually quite different Japanese art form. The existing bonseki article is quite good at describing the nature of the art form, and perhaps this bonkei article needs a bit more description so that it is not easily confused with bonseki. I will remove the "See also" reference to sand painting and the image of a woman with bonseki. Sahara110 (talk) 19:57, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Bonkei and [[bonseki]]

message: : Thank you for adding the resource 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō as Potted Landscapes  to this article. It's fascinating to see well-preserved Japanese documents from this period. 
In your contemporaneous edits, you said a couple of times that these paintings depicted saikei and bonkei:
:The ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Yoshishige created a series of prints of bonkei and saikei titled 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō as Potted Landscapes (Tokaido Gojusan-eki Hachiyama Edyu) in 1848. The book might have been inspired by Utagawa Hiroshige's The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. The bonkei and saikei pieces were created by Kimura Tōsen.
The Public Domain Review article  you referenced has this statement:
:There are two main arts of the potted landscape in Japanese tradition - saikei and bonkei. Similar to the practice of bonsai, saikei is the art of creating tray landscapes, combining miniature trees with rocks and water as well as other vegetation, while bonkei is a permanent tray landscape in which no living materials are used. While saikei landscapes feature only scenes of nature, a bonkei can feature people or buildings, with mountains made out of rocks and sculptable materials such as papier-mâché. It seems that these landscapes created by Kimura Tōsen are the latter.
I think the article suggests all paintings were of bonkei, not saikei (the antecedent to "latter" in the final sentence is ambiguous to me). Also, not to put too fine a point on it, the Japanese art form Saikei was invented after WWII, per WP. Should this section of the Bonkei article be amended to remove the "saikei", or have I missed your full reference?
Sahara110 (talk) 22:01, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Hallo Sahara110, please feel free to correct any mistakes you find, I welcome them of course. It would be wonderful to have images of the objects. Thank you for your help. Gryffindor (talk) 20:36, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to set up a workflow so that I can process all of the 53 Stations graphics files from the Smithsonian consistently. I feel it'll be a job for a bit deeper into winter. I will drop a note here if I'm successful. Sahara110 (talk) 01:57, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'll blame the plague, as my "process the 53 Stations" task took longer than anticipated and I've no better excuse. In brief, I found a different government source for the needed images in plain JPG format, so the whole problem of preserving 'authenticity' that had bothered me is now moot. I'm in the process of importing "53 Stations as bowls of sand and gravel" images into Wikimedia at the moment, and have processed sufficient images already to add a couple to the article. The remainder should be on Wikimedia shortly. Once more, I am grateful to you for bringing these information sources to the article. Sahara110 (talk) 22:25, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text:  Job done. Images of all pages from 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō as Potted Landscapes, including pages of prefatory text, are now uploaded into Wikimedia. I have created a pair of image galleries from the two volumes, which may be moved out of my personal space when I've got a bit more time to create a collection page for the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō as Potted Landscapes. Thank you for keeping me in the loop, as WP's toughness on VPN/TOR access for editing has mostly silenced me in recent years. Sahara110 (talk) 20:10, 22 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question about depiction of ''saikei'' in ''53 Stations of the Tōkaidō as Potted Landscapes''