The Bonsai Museum is born at the MAO.

Starting from October 2023, the terrace of the Museum of Oriental Art will be transformed into an open-air museum , a garden of peace, discovery and study which will host eight specimens of bonsai selected by Massimo Bandera , among the greatest Italian and international bonsai artists. As curator of the project, Bandera will propose a periodic replacement of the exhibited specimens, which will be chosen based on the natural cycle of the seasons and the archetypes of Sino-Japanese symbolism.

Within a renewed vision of the Museum as an open place and social space, the Bonsai Museum also represents an opportunity for the MAO to rethink the artistic object and an opportunity to offer visitors a new object, a new perspective to to observe the Asian world.

Born in China over 2,000 years ago, where the practice consisted of creating incredible miniature landscapes, bonsai arrived in Japan in 700 AD, where it radically transformed and, focusing exclusively on plants, developed an original and aesthetically well-defined style.

The term bonsai, which literally means "pruned tree in a pot", is a practice that is deeply influenced by Japanese Zen Buddhism and combines botanical wisdom with an aesthetic idea linked to the concept of seishi, the art of giving a shape and cultivate with respect for the plant. Despite its size, the bonsai is therefore living nature and retains all the energy contained in a normal-sized tree. 

Following his idea of "avant-garde bonsai", that is, acting with the utmost respect for the reality of nature, avoiding stereotypes and safeguarding one of the fundamental principles of Japanese aesthetics according to which nature should not be copied, but its process must be imitated creative, Massimo Bandera presents at the MAO a selection of trees including pines, junipers, maples, apple trees and hornbeams from the collection of the Masiero Bonsai Museum , which will be alternated according to the season.