Feng Shui

Exhibitions installed with feng shui include:

Brooding on what I have lived through, if even I know such suffering, the common man must surely be rattled by the winds
Grünerløkka Kunsthall. Oslo, Norway. 2013
Curated by Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson.

Health and Prosperity in the Age of Kleptomania
IASPIS, International Artists Studio Program in Sweden. Stockholm. 2012
Curated by Laura Mott

Gladly Will I Sell For Profit, Dear Merchants of the Town, My Hat Laden With Snow
DUMBO Arts Center. Brooklyn, NY. 2011
Curated by Karl Erickson
Layout of the exhibition completed in consultation with New York-based internationally renowned feng-shui master Pun Yin.

Feng Shui Consultation
0047 Gallery. Oslo, Norway. 2011
Layout completed in consultation with Oslo-based feng-shui experts Gabriella Chow & Christina Aas

HEALTH AND PROSPERITY IN THE AGE OF KLEPTOMANIA

Health and wellness are conditions of beauty and success, and in art, the capturing of such beauty at its peak is classical. Protest often manifests as the voluntary blockage of good health and prosperity. however, since pathological kleptomania drives a wide swath of (us) losers into debt, overwork or idleness, and desperation – could health in fact be a possible strategy of protest?

The Greek ideals of harmony and proportion are remarkable reflections of the health of the body and the polis. However, a hellas-centric alibi is a tired meme in western narcissism: why the insistence on perceived proximity for self-identity? Why is repetition and familiarity comforting? Yet another plunder of Greece seems tasteless after the EU and the IMF has already stripped it bare: this will not be yet another text where mythic and unsatisfying inspiration is drawn from the ancient cradle of elite democracy. let’s have a look instead at other fountains of wisdom, hidden a mouse-click away. China seems to be on the ascent to world domination, let’s consider its ancient sages.

FENG-SHUI

We worked with feng shui experts to set up our exhibitions for several years. We are also learning to apply the principals ourselves, thanks to the Internet, which is replacing the warm- body, master-student system (losing something and gaining something else.)

When working with feng shui experts, shibboliths such as the creativity of the artist and the curing abilities of the curator are delegated to another kind of expert. No nail, light fixture, pipe, windowpane or crack can escape from totalizing meaning in feng shui or in contemporary art: but there is a thin line between prac- ticality and ideology. Feng shui was banned during the communist Cultural Revolution, but survived in the Chinese diaspora, and has since thrived in global neoliberal capitalism because ev- erything can be monetized, especially the immaterial.

Literally translated “wind and water,” feng shui is based on the concept that home, business and burial place must be arranged in harmony with natural forces in order to maximize health. Ch'i rides the feng (wind) but is held up in shui (water). a site that attracts water will attract and hold ch’i. (1)

What is ch’i? It seems to have meant something like life energy, life breath, and vapor: an even more ambiguous vitalism. Since human life depends on fresh water supply for breath, it is pre-rational wisdom that a magic life essence would move in flowing clouds and water. What about today? Water will always be an essential basis for life, but its importance has been usurped by another liquid: capital. the flows and cycles of capital are like rainfall: some places are chronically undersupplied, and others are chronically drenched. Norway and New England get heavy precipitation. Niger is at the heart of the rapidly expanding sahara and among the countries with lowest ranked GDP. Feng shui is adeptly adopted by today’s market: the flow of ch’i has transferred to the flow of capital.

Can faith systems have a positivist measurement? Will the masses be able to tell the difference between a teleological and a mechanistic reading of the signs? Nonsense colonizes with ease and facility, fueled by the earth’s most plentiful and renewable resource: stupidity.

HARMONY

There has never been a “golden age” of peace and harmony in human civilization. There has never been a time of great harmony between humans and nature. Humans were ravaged by nature until the industrial revolution when humans began to return fire, leading of course, to humans being ravaged by nature even more (cancer, hurricanes, global warming, etc). there are no “good ol’ days” – paleo diets and Gardens of Eden are deeply cynical marketing. There are only brief moments, tiny pockets of thriving, accidental calm in the rough seas of human history. Potential lessons could come from studying conditions of these ephemeral, isolated, harmonic moments in order to implement and expand them. It could be a goal to generate and grow harmonic islands, to make them as structurally reproducible as possible before they are swallowed, or collapse upon themselves for the same reasons that they will always implode.

There are several conditions necessary for social harmony. First, the land and the weather must be fruitful and bearable in order to provide the essential nutrients for a population. Second, kleptomaniac and zealot neighbors who covet resources for themselves must be avoided or kept at bay. Third, there must be some quiet, relaxed, social bonds between the people that are not too dogmatic. Life must be easy to sustain, but not so easy that free time is used to develop pathological greed. Psychopaths must be managed socially, contained rather than worshiped. When a harmony oasis is surrounded by mountains or sea it is easier to defend for longer. How can we balance ourselves with nature when the continents shift violently beneath our feet, and our neighbors play road warrior on the road? It would be temporary balance, of course, the improbable balance of a few brief moments. Harmony is fleeting — rare in a soul, and rarer in a public, particularly in our over-populated present. Singularities of consciousness and the all-determining natural universe are interwoven, no matter how much effort culture makes to separate people from everything else.

The people of the Basque Country maintained autonomy for thousands of years in relative harmony thanks mostly to the fact that their villages are tucked into deep, easy to defend, rainy mountains, and their fishermen could easily pluck cod from the Bay of Biscay. Several island people survived in relative harmony, such as on hawaii and tasmania, before eventually being overrun by genocidal kleptomaniacs from across ponds. People thrived in the bounty of Vancouver Island for at least 14,000 years, in apparent harmony, but were periodically shaken by earthquakes and tsunamis. Are there pockets of harmony now in capitalism? If so where are they? Prenzlaur Berg, Palo Alto, Roppongi, Gangnam, Deep Water Bay, Frogner, and the Upper East Side? The minimal, Buddhist-inspired offices of Steve Jobs must have been an oasis of calm and harmony inside the maelstrom of office warfare, marketing, litigation, factory suicides, and child mineral miners. Costa Rica also seems like a pretty nice place to spend a 401(k).

CH’I CORRALLING

The infirm harmony in our present moment is the fruit of ch’i corralling. everything is accounted for, we are all tied down to one of the few varieties of the winning ideology. Our systems have become massive, enough to invert mountain and reverse rivers. China’s three Gorges Dam altered the rotation of the earth, and moved the poles. Empire has become a word that is too small to account for the monstrous calculations of data analysis and blockchain ledgers.

The Chinese idea of the “Grand Norm” advances two theories to explain the interdependency of the human and natural worlds. First, the teleological reading that “heaven” becomes angry and causes abnormal natural phenomena when the sovereign maintains wrong conduct. The second theory is a mechanistic reading: the sovereign’s bad conduct disturbs nature resulting in abnormal phenomena. These two readings are played out in mainstream press and megachurch sermons from several ideo- logical viewpoints. “Act of God” or “force majeure” is a legal term for things beyond human control such as floods and hurricanes. The key message from a study on Indian disasters is that so-called natural disasters are not force majeure, they are force hominis: caused or at least worsened by the stupidity and/or cruelty of humans. “When we discuss disasters, ‘nature’, human factors, social systems, policies, politics and poverty are inseparable.”(2) Badly placed dams and dangerously located and constructed houses do not build themselves. Climate change was not set off by force majeure and inequality is clearly force hominis.

Are libertines and liberals to blame for the flooding in New York and New Orleans, or are our sovereign, decadent, orgies to blame? Zealots see premonitions and signs of God’s punishment everywhere, but cannot register scientific data on how methane being released by melting permafrost in siberia might be a bummer, even for the richest and self-medicated among them. Wall street was hit by storm floods that scientists suggest may be caused by climate change: a mechanistic reading by the principle of the “Grand Norm,” would suggest the storm was the result of imbalanced, unregulated capital and its emissions. Furthermore, the site, Manhattan, gathers too much ch’i borne by winds from Iowa and waters from the New York Harbor, one of the largest natural ports in the world.

Ch’i is about harmony, but what exactly does this word mean? The Chinese meanings of the word harmony are more differentiated and colorful than our English word stemming from the usual Greek. harmonía, goddess of agreement, and the Greek verb, harmozo, mean to fit together, to join. Ok, that is not so interesting. Chinese however has rich variations of the word harmony: musical harmony is: 韶, amicability and neighborly is: 睦, natural harmony is: 融合, melting is: 融入, and there are many, many variations from the five root characters: róng, mù, sháo, hé, and xié. the signature ideology for hu Jintao and communist party China is the character 和 (hé) for harmony: “a prosperous society free of social conflict.” Ah yes, a society free of social conflict: how is that achieved, by restraining life’s liberty of movement? By corralling living beings into aesthetic forms? By liquidating conditions for sustainable, rural, self-sufficiency in order to fill the slave factories that manufacture Silicon Valley? We are re- minded again of the spectacularly grotesque Beijing Olympics opening ceremony where life was perverted into aesthetic form for viewing pleasure from high above.

To be in harmony with the present ideological universe means to be swimming in the great, heavily guarded flow of capital. Borders and trade routes run under shadows cast by nuclear arms, and militarized police guarantee the “graduated sovereignty” of citizen subjects.

AESTHETIC INSURANCE

The feng shui industry is used today by Chinese and Western believers and non-believers alike as an extra insurance policy, because, why not? Feng shui is often used to appease potential Chinese business connections, very desirable even during protectionist regimes. The feng shui industry is also successful because it spices up a blasé, banal, daily existence, much like art, with secular spirituality. Enforced liquidity is the ideal in another institution: the kunsthalle, a non-collecting, temporary location for art. The kunsthalle taps into world streams of ch’i, visualizing e*flux.

The AESTHETICS OF HEALTH

A meme in contemporary art is the aesthetics of health: athletics and the body as temple lifestyle industry on display. Artists are using sports gear such as yoga mats, climbing grips, surf boards, foam bike tape, grip tape, water bottles, weight lifting gear, skateboards, and mountain climbing gear in style-altered ready-mades. Timur si-Qin did a show at Société Berlin of a series of yoga mats melted on sheets of steel in summer 2013. His work is a vaguely fascist celebration of the “evolutionary psychology” of advertising, mostly involving young, beautiful and healthy bodies, a neoliberal Leni Riefenstahl. This aesthetic of anti-critical market conformism justified by selected, perverted snippets of science and philosophy (scientific racism, along with the ubiquitous, extremely reactionary, market-friendly readings of object oriented ontology,) (3) is widespread in the elite braches of the art ecosystem. Pamela Rosencranz regularly shows brand name water bottles filled with different shades of skin-colored cream and stretched “high tech” sports fabric smeared with the same cosmetic. Roman Signer has used broken, sectioned or stressed canoes since at least the 1980’s. Bicycle gear reached a particularly hot moment around 2012, because of its slick, customizable, abstract details such as highly coordinated color combinations and pattern trim highlights in individualized, aestheticized, hi- tech materials. Speaking at length with one young Norwegian artist, we assumed he approached his hyper masculine, sexualized bicycle gear, eye-candy sculptures, with some criticality or irony of the health industry. It took us a few minutes to realize that neither he nor his work were ironic or critical in the slight- est. He was legitimately in love with his expensive bicycle and all its trimmings, his peak experience was to cruise the streets of oslo, flexing his muscular legs. Who can blame him? Health and physical beauty is wonderful, the most desirable part of life, and the primary marketing tool for everything. Health is also very expensive: it is to die for.

Is punkish self-destruction an aesthetic protest anymore? The busy-ness vile-maxim is rock n roll destruction of health and well-being on an epic, worldwide binge. So wouldn’t health and prosperity be the appropriate protest? Perhaps, but a healthy worker is an ideal, mute citizen running the hamster wheels in gyms overlooking the corralling of ch’i on busy-ness street corners of our great cities. The busy-ness of health is a luxury for those who do not themselves labor in order to eat. Finally, ultimately, capital does not care whether consumers (aka people) are alive or AI, healthy or plague-ridden. If a market begins to contract, capital is shifted to the next battlefield, strategically repositioned by healthy, yoga practicing middle-managers who market product grades to all levels of health and prosperity.

SUN AND SHADE

In summer 2011, we asked feng shui master Pun Yin to do the lay out of our exhibition in New York. She had never worked with an art exhibition, although she had worked with big business and big government — Donald Trump, (4) Mayor Bloomberg, and the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation were among her clients. (She has also been on Fox news and the Conan o Brian show, the latter using humorous condescension, the former respectfully condescending.) We had a tiny budget, but Pun Yin was curious about the art world so she agreed to work with us for a discount price.

Yin and yang find their earthly connections in measurements of sun and shade. life is possible with the correct proportion of sun and shade. It is possible, thanks to technology and resource exploitation, that a metropolis such as Dubai can exist in a burn- ing desert, and that frozen, bleak oslo is among europe’s fastest growing capitals. the balance of sun and shade is shifted by us- ing air conditioning systems and air-conditioned supply trucks running distribution patterns of air conditioned trucks carrying air conditioning units to air-conditioned supply centers. yin and yang is essential in feng shui — life needs the correct proportion of sun and shade. Furthermore, the 5 elements must be balanced for harmony. Improbable harmony makes life possible, for real: this is more than vitalism or literary cleverness. scientifically, if we don’t have all our internal physical systems running smoothly, in a suitably mild climate, our lives will end within moments. Likewise, food can be shipped up to frozen Oslo, but as soon as the oil fund runs dry and distribution networks shift to avoid the bankrupt place, its population will drain out, and life will shift elsewhere. Oslo before too long will look like a drab, corporate herculaneum for archeologists to sift through.

CH’I CORALLING

The ideal busy-ness sees the prosperous flow of ch’i corralled ever upwards. Motion, flow and non-stop turnover are ideal in feng shui and ideal in busy-ness governance applied to every facet of life. Precarity is encoded into law. Property taxes in the United States, (and many countries, even socialist ones) to give one example, are designed so that no one actually owns their own property, even if there is no mortgage or landlord. Taxes on the total value of a property are assessed by formulas called millages, and they are a means of taxation to have resources for public works and infrastructure such as schools, instead of relying on the prosperity of robust income and corporate taxes that refract the flow of ch’i. Since property taxes can be many thousands of dollars per year per dwelling, or more for places zoned for business, this means that there must always be economic activity connected with any property, big or small, commercial or domestic. We see a particularly insidious chain of events in Detroit and other cities with large populations of precariat (mostly black) homeowners who are forced out of their long-term homes to make way for “urban revivals” and “developments” because they can’t afford rising property taxes. There must always be a flow of ch’i coming into and out of all properties in the United States or else they will be “foreclosed” upon by local governments. The person who otherwise owned the property outright will be forced into homelessness due to blockage of ch’i, if they lose their job, if their busy-ness falls out of favour with the masses, etc. It becomes exaggerated and extreme in “developing” urban areas when property values shoot to the moon resulting in cities filled with the most economically “productive” activities. This is a simple means of control using the rhetoric of the flow of ch’i for the health of the community. U.S. property taxes make explicit that there is no space for failure, dissonance, experimentation, reflection, pro-test, simple living, or other bad or blocked ch’i. (Remember that tax-exempt not-for-profit status is highly regulated, and forbids “political activity.”) People or activities not following the legis- lated flow of ch’i cannot maintain a space of their own, and are forbidden to rest in place, in health or harmony.

One argument that the opponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act (aka “obamacare”) provisions came up with is that “that they are beyond the scope of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce because they regulate inactivity (declining to purchase health insurance) as opposed to regulating economic activity.” (5) This interesting implication reminds us that in neoliberalism, law is used to enforce flow: there can be no still water. Ch’i must flow. The mandate of a nation to care for every person within is replaced by the mandate that every person must hustle, churning in place, or else face unspeakable penalties.

Another busy-ness location where the flow of ch’i is coralled ruthlessly is in education. In busy-ness education, students and teachers should flow freely without the burden and bind of security or an image of the future. The architecture of education ensures the direction of the current. Tenure is now won like a lottery. Even in Scandinavia local governments have removed tenure from the art academies, leaving professors of art to flow around with limited contracts, uprooting any possibility of solid connection to the community or to grow within the institution. The U.S. adjunct teacher strategy is the same but with rock-bottom working conditions: adjuncts are “incentivized” to flow out of their awful, overworked, precarious situation. And in much of the Westernized world, the protagonists in education – the stu- dents – flow through the edu-factories, human rivers of ch’i, liquidity corralled into pre-determined class stratifications, yoked with securitized debt.

TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE CORRALLED

Traditional knowledge can be a lucrative market, especially when it is health related; yoga is another of many examples. But while capitalism can revive ancient forms, it does so by freeze drying and packaging traditional knowledge as intellectual property to be owned like lumps of gold. The kleptomaniac content industry attacks the public domain with waves of legal attacks supported by government, thanks to relentless industry lobbying. Disney lifted folk tales from the public domain and then blocked them off with copyright claims, and lobbied congress to extend copyright terms, etc. etc. (6) Facebook polices the words “face” and “book.” Usage of basic words such as apple or alphabet are restricted, and the list grows daily.

The California “master” Bikram Choudhury, self-proclaimed hollywood “yoga teacher to the stars,” used the U.S. legal code to claim his “intellectual property” — ancient yoga poses. Bikram’s claims are historically, ethically, aesthetically, intellectually, sci- entifically, logically, ontologically, and categorically invalid, in every way, but that did not stop his legal team from extorting “settlements” from those without the legal resources to fight him. In 2012, after years of legal limbo, the U.s. copyright office finally woke up, ruling that ancient yoga sequences are not protected by copyright as it is currently written.(7) World copyright and patent offices are taking notice of India’s bold move to fight chi coralling of traditional knowledge, by assembling the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, a database of 1200 Ayurvedic, Unani and Siddha Formulations assembled and searchable in order to invalidate biopirating and bioprospecting by establishing prior art evidence easily read by judges. For example, a record from 2013 lists an abandoned patent application to the U.s. Patent office for the use of hing spice as an “agent for expelling parasites in humans, animals or birds.” Comfortably in the public domain, we can all freely sprinkle hing (asafetida) to expel parasites from our system.

CHARTS

Master Pun Yin arrived in the Dumbo art space with our personal charts in hand after having spent the previous evening consulting her books. Personal charts are important in feng shui to determine harmony and the occupant’s innate compatibility with the space. Alejandra’s chart said she was missing metal, the curator was missing wood and Aeron’s chart was perfectly balanced, missing nothing — very unusual according to Pun Yin. Alejandra needs to wear metal jewelry for the rest of her life. (Interesting because she is allergic to metal, her skin turns grey and breaks out in rashes.) Everything in the space can be altered and adjusted for harmony except one thing: Alejandra is the sign of the snake and Aeron is the sign of the boar — mortal enemies. Pun Yin glanced up at us with deep disapproval, but she maintained a respectful silence. We have been together since 1995.

After a reading of the space itself, it was determined that our work needed very specific organization in order for balance to be achieved. a composition of upward motion assists the dynamic flow of ch’i, and demonstrates creativity. Upward motion can be simulated with angles and triangles, therefore, we should arrange our works in these shapes. she also recommended certain of our more fragile works should be protected by using solid colors on the floor, punctuated with flowers. But nothing could be done about the building itself. Homes and businesses should not be under bridges, ch’i is whisked this way and that.

DUMB, DUMBER

Dumbo, the branded neighborhood, got its name from being under the Manhattan Bridge, although it is also under the Brooklyn Bridge. Pun Yin, the pragmatist, said that the entire neighborhood absorbs the bad ch’i generated by being under these two massive bridges, and there is really nothing that could be done about it from a feng shui perspective. The giant white column in the center of the exhibition space, on the other hand, structural support for when commodities were stored within the city, could be countered by painting it gold. Pun Yin strongly suggested this giant would become invisible. Our show looked great after Pun Yin was done and several visitors remarked that the art center had never looked better. However Dumbo art Center would be closed a year later, an invisible non-profit in the middle of New York’s ch’i typhoon.

Pun-yin wrote:

“FIRST & most UNIQUE exhibition in New York EVER ~ Art & Feng Shui collaboration of 3 world renowned masters who convey energy through history, textures, east meets west contents, old & new techniques for the 21 century. The exhibition by Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas will be placed in cohesion to the art of Authentic Chinese Feng Shui by the reigning Feng Shui master of the world – Master Pun-Yin who brought Feng Shui into main- stream America and internationally since the early 90’s. This ex- hibition would truly be a unique experience of all senses because you would be enveloped with “harmony in detail.” Master Pun-Yin’s solid reputation for helping to turn the fortunes of her high profile clients around since the early 90’s documented by the int’l press. FORTUNE Magazine in 1996 wrote that “her work marks a new nexus between this country’s corporate and metaphysical sectors.”

For more info. please visit www.punyin.com

(From the book Telepathy 传心术 by Bergman and Salinas. INCA Press, 2018)

1. Fung yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New york: Macmillan Company, 1948)

2. Unni krishnan, s. Parasuraman, “India Disasters Report II: Redefining Disasters,” oxford University Press (2013).

3. We can imagine the exuberant scene of the board meeting at Nestle when
it was excitedly announced that there is a para-academic movement afoot that grants objects, such as jars of instant coffee and bottles of privatized tap water, the same legal, social and philosophical status and rights as human beings.

4. this was written before trump was elected president on a platform that, among other things, railed against trade with China despite having actively done so himself.

5. Jedediah Purdy & Neil s. siegel, “the liberty of Free Riders:
the Minimum Coverage Provision, Mill’s ‘harm Principle,’ and american social Morality,” American Journal of Law & Medicine, 38 (2012): 374-396.

6. see lawrence lessig’s books for more.

7. Federal Register, Vol. 77, No. 121. June 22, 2012. http://www.copyright.gov fedreg/2012/77fr37605.pdf.