There’s a house I pass on the way to my mother’s, which had an incredible front yard. When the guy’s wife died, he apparently threw himself into the garden they’d tended together. For years he crafted a kind of freehand Chinese landscape in front of his 1960s ranch house. There were these incredible trees, some kind of pine, I don’t know, very long, droopy branches like willows, windswept like Van Gogh cypresses, with long-needles, and then some rocks and bursts of tall grasses. It felt a bit idiosyncratic, but an obvious masterpiece, especially amidst the generic lawns or Sketch-up xeriscaping.
Then the house went up for sale, and the buyer ended up scraping the whole thing. Whatever’s there now is irrelevant, and I wonder how many people driving by even remember what was created—and what was lost.
I thought of that garden when I saw this bonsai forest in the auction of Jonathan and Margaret Chen’s collection at LA Modern. JF Chen is one of the biggest, most influential antique and furniture dealers in the modernist world. The Chens seem to be going strong, inshallah, and their store on Melrose is in their daughters’ capable hands, but it does seem like they’re paring back.
Maybe this bonsai forest is a product, assembled and cultivated by Chen’s bonsai whisperer to the stars. Or maybe it’s been on the back deck for forty years, I don’t have the skill to tell. But I do feel like buying a bonsai tree is a multigenerational commitment of care, like taking in someone’s dog–if dogs lived to be a two hundred years old. And this is a whole forest. The chances of someone screwing this up feel very high.
Lot 159, 5 Mar 2026, Bonsai Forest, est. $4-6,000 [lamodern]