Not far off the I-5 interstate south of Seattle is a public bonsai collection gem, Pacific Bonsai Museum. Full of diverse and top-notch specimens, for years it has served as a locus to inspire and educate us about bonsai.
Pacific Bonsai Museum. Image courtesy Pacific Bonsai Museum
Pacific Bonsai Museum brings another rare element. For the past 10 years curator Aarin Packard has been at the helm of their exhibitions, and he comes at them from a unique direction.
Aarin Packard. Image courtesy Pacific Bonsai Museum
I asked Aarin if he would talk about the intentions behind these exhibitions. Here is our conversation.
You’re known for connecting bonsai with social themes, which has largely been avoided in public bonsai display. Can you speak to what drives this desire?
Exhibition design was my main focus in graduate school. So my idea on coming here was to treat bonsai as art objects such as you would see in a fine art museum, and disassociate them from the tradition. Which allows you to interpret them in other ways. Finding new ways to present something is a challenge, and it’s what I love about exhibitions.
With an exhibition you can take something with a preconceived notion—“OK, I know what this is”—and then expand our awareness of its interconnectedness. And then it no longer seems so isolated. Finding or creating those connections is what a curator, from an exhibition design perspective, does.
So using bonsai not just for the traditional Japanese practice and the obvious ways it’s been presented…
Which is in a box already…
Right, exactly. People know what that is. And that’s typically what you’d expect to see at a public bonsai collection. So here we teach information that is not necessarily about bonsai. In other words, to use the bonsai to share how they can connect to other subject areas.
And some of these subjects are very close to bonsai. Like World War Bonsai: Remembrance & Resilience which looked at how WWII as an event impacted bonsai. Which allowed us to connect trees to history in a way people maybe don’t appreciate.
Is that a first, as far as you know?
Within my understanding, I don’t think there’s been a formal exhibition in a museum looking at bonsai in WWII. I do know people have done research on it. Our exhibition traced the cultural practice of bonsai from the pre-WWII period, through wartime, amid incarceration, and at peace.
From the exhibition introductory panel: “Reading the biographical stories of bonsai artists working in the World War II-era paired with those artists’ living legacies, we discover a powerful and inspiring untold history. We encounter bonsai as displays of patriotic loyalty and subversive acts of defiance. We find assertions of cultural identity and the sheltering comfort of community. We witness bonsai artists’ adaptability and resiliency amid loss, grief, humiliation, and despair that allowed them to keep going and start over. We see the art of bonsai as a bridge to greater cultural appreciation and reconciliation that inspired generations of bonsai artists all over the world.” Image courtesy Pacific Bonsai Museum
Many people commented to me how powerful that show was for them. So, which of the special displays you’ve put on were—out of, what is it, twelve or fifteen shows so far—in your opinion, particularly impactful to the community?
Well, currently there are four that, for whatever reason, felt like standout shows. Skating the Edge: Exhibitions from Pacific Bonsai Museum’s First 10 Years was our retrospective that looked back at the four most significant exhibitions: Decked Out, Natives, World War Bonsai, and Avant-garden.
Image courtesy Pacific Bonsai Museum
Like World War Bonsai, Natives is a first, right?
Yes, that was one of the first of its kind. We utilized species native to North America as a feature with large artwork as a backdrop. And in bonsai display we’re always going for location, like with kusamono, but here we had the hyper locality of volcanic ash for the Alaskan glacier installations, with the mineralogy of the pot glazes sourced from the locales where the trees come from.
I love that stuff!
A display from Natives. Image courtesy Pacific Bonsai Museum
The exhibition with the skate boards was your first show, right?
Yes, Decked Out felt like an authentic expression, a first year exhibition that involved collaboration with other artists. My undergrad was in cultural anthropology, and one question is how does art remain relevant to a culture. Tradition is of course a part of that—what is that Winston Churchill quote, “Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” Making the case for both.
So, as many don’t connect with Japanese aesthetics or Japanese culture, I try to offer different connections. I’ve always described it as providing as many paths to bonsai as possible. That people can approach it from where they are at.
A display from Decked Out. Image courtesy Pacific Bonsai Museum
I was just looking at some of the images from Small Talk: All the Dirt on Growing Mini-but-mighty Trees, and your modernization of the messaging there.
That is our attempt to answer the most frequently asked questions. In a museum space, which is more didactic, we can do that with signs. How often do you water, or repot, for instance.
And many of the exhibitions reflect my current state of life. Going from skate boards to now having a 13-year old, to present bonsai so that kids won’t be bored reading the signage. Texts and emojis—this is the vernacular that helps connect to middle-schoolers. To make it more fun and light. And not so austere.
A display from Small Talk: All the Dirt on Growing Mini-but-mighty Trees. Image courtesy Pacific Bonsai Museum
So just a final question, any sneak peak you can offer about an upcoming show?
Yes, so Small Talk goes through 2025, it’s a two year show. Given the effort to mount something like that it will stay as a marquee exhibition. We’re really leaning into youth—middle school to high school age kids—and families as the demographic we’re after.
One thing we’ve noticed is a greatly increased visitation length for adults. People are staying in this exhibition for an hour where before they might have stayed for thirty minutes. Some go through a second time. Which is the first time we’ve seen that kind of engagement. And with complex information, too, like transpiration and photosynthesis but explaining it in a way that is fun.
This year we also have an exhibition of miniature tree houses in bonsai, Building Wonder, also for kids—and for the kids-at-heart. The treehouses were created by an animator. What I’m exploring is the idea of the tree house, what do they represent—freedom, innocence, youth, connection to nature. And that sometimes a tree house is the first thing we build. The reference of scale, with us being inside the tree, that sort of connection.
This exhibition opened February 11, 2025 and is up until December 21, 2025. Image courtesy Pacific Bonsai Museum
Can you think of another exhibition about bonsai geared towards kids?
Well, back in the day there was a kids book about bonsai, but outside of that book I don’t know of a show that has tried to speak to kids intentionally. And maybe there has been another child-friendly effort, but to this scale, no, I don’t think so.
But then, you think you’re doing something new and creative and then discover, no, someone has done it before…
Right—I made some 3-D printed slabs as bonsai supports and only later realized others had already done it. But we must think, all these elements are coming together at the same time, and people are going to spark the same ideas. It’s part of the zeitgeist.
And I think that is what good museum curation is about, that it has tapped into that zeitgeist. And even better is if a curator can be a bit ahead of it.
Also, we do things that are authentic to us and where we’re at. Like bonsai are expressions of ourselves, the exhibitions are an expression of me. You can trace life progression by the exhibitions. I have young kids and now I’m interested in how to present bonsai to them. I wasn’t thinking about that ten years ago.
Well cool! Thanks Aarin!
To learn more about Pacific Bonsai Museum and their current and past exhibitions, to join, donate, or engage in other ways, visit their website.