International suiseki exhibition

Collecting and displaying stones is known throughout Asia, though under different names. It is, for example, called gongshi in China, and suseok in Korea, but it is Japan that has developed its fine style of exhibiting stones known as suiseki, and it is the Japanese art of collecting and displaying small rocks that has gained popularity all over the world. In Europe, suiseki has been known for over three decades; however, due to a mixture of various Asian influences on this art, stone lovers initially found it difficult to tell the difference between rocks coming from China or another Asian country and those from Japan.

Since 2000, it has become clear that Japanese suiseki art considerably differs from other ways of exhibiting stones. This was due to the influence of Master Arishige Matsuura, who was one of the first to undertake to explain these differences to the world.

At the Manggha Museum, suiseki began to surface in the late 1990s, although the breakthrough did not come until the autonomous International Suiseki Exhibition in 2012, with contributing collectors from Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The show was also graced by Master Matsuura (the world’s greatest authority on this art and for years the leader of the Nippon Suiseki Association), who showed much appreciation for it, despite the highly intuitive work that had gone into creating it. Subsequently, the exhibition participants came up with the idea to create a group of leaders with a view to teaching and propagating Japanese suiseki in the three countries: Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland. The project – and the group that created it – were named San Seki (‘three stones’). Their efforts culminate in an annual suiseki exhibition held in one of the contributing countries.

Master Matsuura visited Kraków once again in 2016; he viewed the San Seki exhibition, which made a great impression on him, and was very pleased with the effects of its participants’ work. This year the exhibition comes back to the Manggha. San Seki are going to display the group’s finest suiseki, Japanese stones and figurative stones, which will also be entries in the exhibitors’ internal competition. Suiseki (Jap. ‘water and stone’) is an art of Chinese origin, consisting in artistic display of stones whose shape or texture reflects an exis