About a week ago, I was telling one of my friends about this blog assignment. When I told her that I was thinking about writing about feng shui, she asked what interior decorating had to do with China. Of course, not wanting to be a total jerk to her, I told her that the decoration version is based off of ancient Chinese ideals.
Feng shui is not just about placing bamboo in a glass vase with shiny black rocks at the bottom, like most American's have simplified it to be. The art of feng shui is a belief that incorporates astronomy into everyday decisions in order to create correlations between humans and the universe. This art is not just some painting you hang on a wall, but rather this is real serious business, especially in pre-modern Chinese politics. Feng shui started around 4000 B.C., and is still used today.
What decorators and designers around the world have done is taken the essential aspect of attaining Chi and modified it to finding the right flow. For example, an interior decorator places furniture in a certain arrangement so that the room can flow, or an architect can design a building so that it can have an astronomical flow. An example of such a building stands in Hong Kong, and has a square hole horizontally though the middle of it so that the Chi can be achieved.
I am interested to see both how feng shui has affected the modern architecture and design, as well as to see how the younger generation views the importance of these beliefs. Also, here in the United States, feng shui is one of the interior decorating crazes; America’s Next Top Model is totally rockin’ it; but what about in its homeland of China? Is it really ‘hip’ there or is it something of the past?
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