The Art of Bonsai Project

Although I agree with you that Western art places high importance on individualism, and the cultures from the Orient value even more conformism, what stops you from expressing your individualism through bonsai?
Being impersonal is a matter of choice, not an inherent quality of the bonsai medium.

I'm not stopping, just answering the question why is bonsai not always an artform. Also, in the West there are many people who are just doing bonsai not for self expression, but for small gardening. They don't even think of art or design. More and more I don't dare to use the word (bonsai) without asking "what do you mean with YOUR bonsai ?". There are so many differences ..... that maybe we need another 10 words to distinguish the bonsai from the other bonsai.

The assertion that art is not art unless it's somehow "good" or "culturally accepted" (my interpretation of what has gone before, in this thread) is a bankrupt concept.
The art of a preschool child is no less, and possibly more... given that it is pure expression of concept and untainted by others' direction and bias... art than the work of Picasso or Michelangelo. None of us is in any position to decry the art of another, lest we be found wanting in our judgment, as was the critic of Monet, or Pollock, or the person who first laughed at Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The night was dark and stormy..."
So it is with bonsai. It may seem reprehensible to call all attempts at bonsai "art" to the purists among us, but all attempts at art are art, like it or not. No-one said it was good art, just that it was art.
It's like poor television programmes, (which is almost all of them); You don't have to like them and you don't have to look at them but they have an audience, irrespective of your opinion of them or the audience.
C'est la vie. There is no accounting for taste.