Karesansui （枯山水）
Karesansui（枯山水）is Japanese dry garden or Japanese rock garden. It is commonly known as zen garden. Karesansui（枯山水） is a distinctive style of Japanese garden. It creates a miniature stylized landscape through carefully composed arrangements of rocks, water features, moss, pruned trees and bushes, and uses gravel or sand that is raked to represent ripples in water.
Karesansui（枯山水） art is commonly found at temples or monasteries. It is usually relatively small, surrounded by a wall or buildings, and is usually meant to be seen while seated from a single viewpoint outside the garden, such as the porch of the hojo, the residence of the chief monk of the temple or monastery.
At the beginning, Karesansui （枯山水）was merely developed as a form of garden art. People were intended to imitate the essence of nature, not its actual appearance. Through creating the garden art, people found that this is a very good platform to get into a meditative mind and experience Zen. As a result, Karesansui （枯山水） becomes commonly found in temples and monasteries.
Karesansui （枯山水）later developed into a small plant size scale (mini size). As this occupies less space and is more portable, this helps to raise the popularity of this form of art as this is much more convenient for people with different ages and backgrounds to engage in Karesansui（枯山水）.
In face of the stressful life in HK, we believe Karesansui （枯山水）is a very relaxing art form for Hong Kong people to slow down and practice mindfulness. Hence, we start to introduce Karesansui（枯山水） to teachers and students in Hong Kong. We are glad that the feedback for this is very positive as participants can simply enjoy the time of creating art.