It's A Small World After All

Take one look at Japanese artist Takanori Aiba’s tiny kingdom sculptures, where entire miniature communities are built around bonsai trees, and you’ll feel like Gulliver stepping foot on the imaginary land of Lilliput.

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The Japanese art of bonsai is a painstaking, meticulous process using cultivation techniques like pruning, root reduction, potting, defoliation and grafting to produce small trees contained in little pots, which mimic the shape and style of mature, full-sized trees.

The artist has not only perfected this technique of miniaturisation, but also added scale models of windmills, lighthouses, boats, cars, statues, cliffs, beaches, flags, lampposts and even the Michelin Man to create three-dimensional dream island resorts featuring miniature villages.

He has combined bonsai with Lilliputian architecture, and his creations teem with activity, amazing stories and unique characters.

Dream Small

Takanori’s creations are shaped by his early experience of drawing, bonsai-making, model railway-making, the magical world of Walt Disney and maze illustration. Since young, he has had a fascination with small things and would warp himself into imaginary worlds; as an adult, he has succeeded in making those fantasies come true.

He recalls: “I often went to the hill behind my house to pick uniquely shaped maple branches. Staring at the branch created some sort of illusion, as if I were a Lilliputian, relating to the island in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.