Takashi Horisaki (b. 1974, Tokyo; works in the US and Japan) presents to San Marino, #InstaBonsai, a ceramic sculpture series that marks his first solo exhibition in California. Horisaki examines bonsai from a social media perspective, exploring and critiquing themes of materiality, cultural circulation, and horticultural aesthetics, while probing the layered history of colonialism and orientalism in a digitally mediated world.

Bonsai, an artform of cultivating miniature trees, originated in China as “盆栽” and traveled to Japan around the 12th century. Over centuries, it evolved into Zen Buddhism and elite samurai art forms, and was later co-opted duringJapan's Meiji to Taisho period in the 19th Century as a nationalist symbol and propaganda vehicle. In #InstaBonsai, as a research-driven artist, Horisaki interrogates bonsai’s diasporic and politically intertwined history, examining hownature has been aesthetically idealized and manipulated to serve cultural narratives through nations and authorities. Placed on rotating displays that evoke a curated retail experience, these bonsai evoke predatory gazes towardsthemselves as products of commodification of nature and beauty; still they subtly remind us of the environmental and historical ruptures—colonialism, war, ecological loss—concealed behind each curated digital image, ready to becolonized again by smartphone cameras.

In contrast to how the sculptures were created in a handmade, tactile approach which sometimes takes months for one work, the bonsai’s consumption is meant to be fast. Drawing inspiration from Instagram images tagged with #bonsaiand #盆栽, the objects are designed to be viewed from a mechanism to allure your attention in a frontal-focused perspective. Horisaki’s work frames the viewer’s gaze—such gaze that are unconscious but not innocent, and such gaze that spans landscapes, cyberspaces, and minds-capes, colonizing seen and unseen and invites us to fall prey in an era when our perceptions are increasingly pixelated and mediated.