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What is feng-shui?

 

Most people who are interested in feng-shui know that feng means wind in Chinese, while shui means water. Wind and water. These two elements stand as a metaphor for the power of nature in our world and the importance of respecting that power as we arrange the details of our daily lives.

 

But apart from the the etymology, what does feng-shui mean? Practically everybody who uses feng-shui describes it as an old Chinese teaching about architecture and interior. Many also claim that it is a philosophy, or even a science. To the most ardent supporters it almost resembles a religion.

 

All of this is probably wrong. The mere fact that a master of this discipline surveys the landscape, or uses a compass, does not turn feng-shui into a science. One can study feng-shui for years without discovering the meaning of life, or the origin of it, so it can hardly be a religion. And compared to modern architecture, feng-shui sometimes seems like a digression. Buildings in the old China were usually drafty. They could be very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. People were much more exposed to nature and to the landscape around them than we are today. For us, who have both air conditioning and central heating, double glazing and artificial lightening, it is most of all an esthetic question how we chose to place our houses in the landscape, or how we use various rooms in our houses.

 

Therefore, we are left with one answer, and it doesn't make feng-shui less interesting: It is an art. It is not exact or objective, but an intuitive art, based on old traditions and learning, ancient knowledge combined with a little bit of mysticism.

 

Actually, feng-shui in the old China had little to do with interior and architecture. If so, it had to be landscape architecture, for feng-shui was originally used when constructing burial sites. It was not until later, much later (here we're talking a couple of thousand years!) that it evolved into an art for the living, for instance in the form of garden architecture: Feng-shui was used when constructing a garden. The space one had to one's disposal, was usually limited, and it was believed that feng-shui could assure the most beautiful and harmonious result.

 

Interior

Perhaps one could say that an empty canvas represents some of the same challenges: One has to express oneself on a limited space, and it is two-dimensional. Still, it is quite unusual to speak of feng-shui in connection with pictorial art, not only in Norway, but all over the world.

The first time Mai Cheng did this, was with the exhibition ”Feng-shui Art: Ancient Signs”, which was on display in New York in November and December 2000. Still, people who had followed her over a longer period - for example those who had seen the exhibition "Primitive Languages" in Oslo the previous year or the so called "water pictures", which she exhibited in Brussels and Paris in the middle of the nineties - did feel familiar. Except from the use of leaf gold, which may have increased, and the small pieces of wood that somewhere had turned up on the surface of the paintings, it wasn't difficult to find many of the familiar elements - the red stamps, the calligraphy which ran across (or down) the canvas, the references to Chinese mythology and history, the meetings between various cultures and eras, between signs and symbols from different civilizations, between est and west. Wasn't this really quite old?

 

Yes, it was quite old. Much of it was extremely old. Take for instance the Chinese characters that were carved into the surface of many of her pictures. They are called jiaguwen in Mandarin, and they date back from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1024 BC). Or take the cuneiform characters, which reportedly were developed around year 3000 BC.

 

If anything was new in these pictures, it had to be the combination of the old, the way Mai Cheng had put them together. But when she did this, she used feng-shui, which is a knowledge the Chinese have used for more than 3000 years!

 

Read more about feng-shui...

 
 

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