This is the official catalogue of the 79th Kokufu Bonsai Exhibition, held in 2005 — a volume in one of the longest-running series in the bonsai world.
The Kokufu-ten began in 1934, when bonsai was first shown inside Tokyo’s premier art museum — a bold claim at the time that bonsai belonged among the fine arts. It has run almost every year since, surviving even the disruption of the war years, and is held each February at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno under the Nippon Bonsai Association. No other bonsai exhibition carries this weight of history.
Owning a Kokufu catalogue connects you to that lineage. The 2005 edition is a single link in a chain reaching back ninety years, documenting the trees a particular generation of masters chose to show. Read alongside other editions, it lets you trace how the art has matured decade by decade.
The book is a deluxe hardcover in full colour, recording the more than two hundred bonsai displayed that year, with text in Japanese. The photography is made for careful viewing.
For anyone who values the history of bonsai as much as its practice, a Kokufu album is the most direct way to hold a piece of it. The 79th edition is a worthy addition to any serious collection.
- Exhibition: 79th Kokufu Bonsai-ten
- Year: 2005
- Format: hardcover, full colour
- Contents: 200+ exhibited bonsai, text in Japanese
