Art, images and objects

Feng shui writing is full of objects, and the classical texts have almost none: no crystals, no coins, no frogs, no statues, and no pictures, because the sites they describe had hills instead. What the tradition does have is a way of reading a wall, and once a wall is read as a hillside the rules for what to hang on it follow. This guide gives that rule, the wall the Chinese connoisseurs actually hung, the gallery’s rule for heights, the manuals’ lists of subjects, what the research says a picture can do, and the short classical list of objects with the long modern one labelled as what it is.

Mountain behind, water in front

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The rule reads the room as a site, and it is easier to apply than it sounds. Stand where the main seat is and look at the wall you face: that wall wants depth. Turn round and look at the wall behind you: that wall wants weight. In a bedroom the bed’s wall wants calm as well as weight, and the wall the bed faces wants something a waking eye can rest on. In an entrance the first wall seen wants a picture with depth in it, because it is the view the house has not got.

The wall the tradition hung

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The Chinese house the rules were written in did not have a wall of pictures. It had a hanging scroll, one, on the wall of the hall or the studio, and it changed. Wen Zhenheng’s Treatise on Superfluous Things, the Ming connoisseur’s manual that Clunas studied, gives a calendar for it: plum or orchid in spring, lotus or bamboo in summer, chrysanthemum in autumn, pine or a snow scene in winter, one scroll at a time, hung for days and taken down before it was tired of, with one object on the table beneath that answered it, a bronze, a stone, a branch in a vase. The rest of the collection lived rolled in boxes. Clunas reads the practice as the whole theory of the Ming interior, that a room shows one thing and the thing changes, and it is the origin of the tradition’s own modesty about objects: what is hung is chosen, it is one thing or a few, and it is allowed to go. The wall most rooms have now, everything the household owns hung at once, is the wall the practice was against.

Heights and sizes

The tradition adds its rule about weight overhead. A heavy frame, a shelf of objects or a large mirror over a bed or a seat is read as a beam is read, and the beams and corners guide gives the remedy, which is to hang it elsewhere. Over a bed, nothing heavy, and nothing that could fall; over a sofa, something the wall can hold and the eye can take.

Subjects

The manuals’ lists of what to hang and what not to hang are long and mostly say the same thing. Nothing violent, sad or dying; nothing that shows a single figure alone in a bedroom where two people sleep, which is the Black Sect’s rule about pairs; nothing of water in a bedroom, where it is read as too yin and too moving; nothing of deserts, dead trees or ruins where the tradition wants growth. What it likes is what the site liked: hills, trees, water in front, light, and people who look content to be where they are. The four gentlemen of the literati wall, plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum, were liked for the same reason and for their characters, endurance, modesty, uprightness and late flowering, which is the older tradition’s way of saying what a room should be reminded of.

Objects

The classical list of objects is short: screens, to make a wall where one is missing; plants, for Wood and for corners; water, in front and outside; stone and earth, for weight; light. Everything else on the shelves of a feng shui shop belongs to one school or to none.

Sharp things

The tradition keeps points away from people. A sculpture with a spike, a spear or a sword on a wall, a knife block on a counter facing a seat, a cactus beside a desk: each is read as a small sha aimed at whoever sits or sleeps in its line, and the remedy is to turn it, move it or house it. Swords and weapons are, in the older practice, exterior things, hung over a door to face outward, like the bagua mirror; inside, the manuals want them cased or pointed at a wall. The ghosted object in the drawing below is the one that points at the seat.

The classical list, placed on one room, with the shop’s list ghosted beside it:

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Things from your life

Alexander’s pattern for the objects in a house, Things from Your Life, says that a place becomes one’s own by the things one has placed in it, and the tradition agrees from the other side: it wants the objects in a room to be there because they are wanted there, and it wants the broken, the unloved and the merely bought to leave. The clutter guide gives the test, and the Ming wall gives the method, which is rotation: the things a household loves can all be kept if they are not all out at once. The best object in a room, by the tradition’s reckoning and by the designer’s, is the one that belongs to the person who sits under it.

Checklist

• Behind the seat and the bed: something solid; in front: something with depth
• Centre of a picture at a metre forty-five, a metre twenty-five where it is seen sitting
• Over a sofa, two-thirds its width and a hand above the back; over a bed, nothing heavy
• One thing on a wall, or a few, and let it change; the rest rolled up
• No water behind a seat; no lone figures or water in a shared bedroom, if you follow the schools
• Nothing pointed at a seat or a bed; weapons cased or outside
• Cures named as one school’s; the toad as a toad
• Keep what is yours; remove what is broken or merely bought