Feng Shui and Art

The Chinese believe that the way your home is arranged affects everything in your life, including your health and how much good luck or bad luck you attract. They developed a spiritual art called Feng Shui (pronounced fung shway), which involves arranging your living space by certain principles in order to optimize the energy of your life.

In other words, they believe your home can either make things better for you or make things worse for you. If you arrange things well, you can attract more positive experiences into your life.

While Feng Shui is a very complicated art that requires a lot of knowledge, there are certain basics that you can learn, and these can help you decide what artwork to put on your walls and where the pieces should go. For example, including many different colors in your interior design will help to balance your Chi, which is simply another word for your energy.

One of the easiest ways of introducing color into your home is with art. Modern art expressionists created paintings that are very colorful, often bright and bold. If those colors leave you cold, the pastels of Impressionism , particularly the work of Claude Monet , will bring you lots of color without being at all loud.

Bear in mind that color means different things in the East than in the West. Red is a celebratory color in China and is best in the southern portion of your home. Black signifies abundance and works best in the north.

Like us, pink represents love and romance for the Chinese and is helpful in the rear right corner of your bedroom. Green has to do with health and the eastern direction of your home, purple with spirituality and the south, yellow with energy and the southwest, and blue with career, wisdom, and the north.

Before you purchase art for your home, check in with your body to see how it makes you feel. Do you feel calm, peaceful, or pleasantly exhilarated? Do you feel tense and is your heart rate fast? You certainly want to choose art that feels good to you, and if you check in with yourself in more depth, you may be surprised that some pieces that look good to you don't exactly "feel" good to you.

To determine where to hang your art, you need to figure out where north, south, east, and west are in your home. Then, you need to sketch a floor plan, making note on the plan where the four directions point. To truly Feng Shui your home, you would need to read a detailed book or hire a consultant, but these basic principles can help you to choose art with the proper colors for the various areas in your rooms.

If you are using the principles of Feng Shui, you may also want to incorporate some Asian art in your interior design. Search this site for its sections that separate