Give Your Home an Asian Flair: Building on the Basics

Those of you who know a little about Asian culture will already have picked up the contradiction in my title. For those of you who haven’t, and are prompted to read this by something other than the “Aha, she made a mistake already!” sort of thought, the purpose in my choosing said title is to illustrate and introduce one of the most important, in fact perhaps THE most important aspect of adding a traditional Asian flavor to your home decor: the Asian aesthetic is centered on simplicity and balance. One of the defining aspects of Asian decor and style is that they have no “flair”, they make no flamboyant bid for attention as do other themes. Many people are attracted to Asian designs because they see or subconsciously sense what is lacking in their own hectic, unbalanced lives, but in attempting to recreate it incorporate the same qualities which have removed balance from other aspects of their existence. They clutter spaces with inorganic, mass-produced “Asian” decorations which usually have little if any resemblance to what Asian decorators actually use in their designs. The art of Asian decor is based on deeply rooted principles of Asian culture, and without at least somewhat following these principles, acheiving a true Asian look will be impossible.

So how do you simplify and balance a room? First, pare down the number of objects. A busy room, depending on your sensitivity to your surroundings, can cause you to feel stressed and out-of-control the minute you enter it. Do away with more than you think you can at first, working on small areas. When you have reduced a room’s decor to a fountain, a plant or two, and a tabletop zen garden, you will have made huge steps personally and as a decorator. As with learning anything, exaggerate at first and cautiously move away from the extreme to find balance.

Now that you have pared down, perhaps to bare floor, what next? A good way to begin is by using basic feng shui tenets as a guide, since many of the principles, although usually explained in mystic terms that confuse the beginner more than anything else, are simply common-sense principles that work for very ordinary and fundamental reasons. There is no necessity of becoming a Buddhist monk to profit from the ideas of feng shui – in fact, the essential demystification is in the term itself: it simply means “the way of the wind and the water”, which could as easily be called “flow”. You can explain the effects of strategically placed mirrors by saying they allow “qi” or “energy” to move freely, or you can simply say that the mirror visually enlarges the space and therefore makes you feel less confined and more at ease. Or, even more simply, you can acknowledge that these are universal and time-tested precepts for creating balanced and beautiful surroundings, and look no further than that.

A central theme in Japanese gardening and Japanese culture, most likely resulting from the necessity of making do with small spaces in such a densely populated situation, is the art of using small things to suggest larger things. For example, a classic device in zen gardens is to use mossy rocks to suggest green-topped mountains rising from a sea, usually represented by sand. If you have the time to water a moss rock, it is a beautiful addition to any zen garden or sculpture. But again, beware of clutter. When I was first starting out with zen gardens, I came across the end of a mossy log which, when cut off and stood on end looked exactly like the sort of summit you would see rising out of low clouds in a Japanese painting. It was so perfect I could see the woven-rope walkway clinging like a long root down the side of the cliff, and the monk gardening by his little house on top, and the village about halfway down, a temple on the other side…My sea of sand was soon full of rocks and my mountain a cluttered little experiment in island cultivation. Now I have a container with raked sand and three unremarkable rocks, and it has a power and elemental energy the first, for all its charmingly evocative variation, lacked. Whatever you do, avoid being explicit in your suggestion. Just as open seduction is cheap and ugly, being too obvious with your suggesting destroys the subtlety and reserve that gives Asian decorating its elegance.

Pairing symmetry and asymmetry to create balance is another central device. The concept of yin and yang is another part of Asian culture and decor that many people find unnecessarily intimidating, for various reasons. At its base, it is simply the dance of opposites, the simple and universal fact that three quarters and two eigths make a whole, that male and female naturally complete and complement each other at all levels of existence, whether you are talking about humans or electrical connections. The idea of yin and yang can be used to help you find the perfect decor to complement your personality. For example, I am a naturally centered and moderate personality, so I find my primary living space filling up regularly with organic activity, whether growth or decomposition, and chaotic elements that inspire and interest me. This cycles, also a natural function of yin and yang, leading to too much chaos, which spurs me to simplify, and then I begin accumulating again. For others, for example people whose personalities naturally keep them in motion and regularly plunge them into chaos outside the home environment, the perfect balance may be a static environment in which little changes, thus filling out their personality and effecting balance.

Apply this idea to groupings within a whole as well, arrange items in asymmetrical groups, put two stones in your zen garden close together and one further away, ideally forming an asymmetrical triangle. Sort things in descending order: large to small or the opposite. Asymmetry is the natural order, or lack thereof, that we see in nature, and the mind immediately perceives this without you even realizing it. Contrasting cycles are also more natural than rigid constants. Contrast circles and squares to touch both ends of the spectrum and suggest a point centered between the two extremes. In Asian culture a circle represents the universe and Heaven, a square, the earth, and a triangle, man. Therefore a design which incorporates all three of these is the essential triangle, the most dissimilar and yet most complete grouping of all. This idea goes against the fundamental instinct of humans to dominate and control nature, and is a skill that must be learned through practice and expperimentation. You will find yourself at first working patterns even into your asymmetrical arrangements. You learned order very early in life and it will hamper your ability to create anything truly random until you can bring yourself to let go of the compulsive desire to organize everything. Again, those personality types who struggle most with this are those that need most to face it, so take initial failure and subconscious resistance as an indicator that you are on the right track.

Proportion is very important as well in Asian themed decor. As always, balance is key, so keep that in mind, and remember that yin and yang principles say that large completes small and vice versa. So, in a large space, you can have a much greater number of small, knickknacky items, and in fact should have a reasonable amount of detail and complexity to avoid an imbalance, whereas in a small space you should stick to a few large, simple, elementary objects to complement the physical lack of size. At the same time, avoid disparities that are too great, for example do not pair a tiny decoration with a vast wall nook or attempt a floor-to-ceiling fountain in a bungalow.

The deeper you delve into the reasons behind the way Asians decorate their living spaces, and the more you practice designing an environment based on those principles, the deeper your understanding of what a truly “Asian” look is will become, and the better you will become at recreating it. Studying feng shui guides and books on Asian design may be useful in giving you ideas, but keep in mind that the basics are the main thing, and the minute you stray too far from them, you have lost the essence of Asian thought and practice. As you experiment, you will develop a sense, too, for what works, often without knowing why. The Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi asserted that books were rubbish since true knowledge of things could only be gained through experience, and not passed on through the written word. In the same way, although you may find books helpful on your way toward gaining experiential knowledge of feng shui, that is, gaining an intuitive sense for what is right or wrong in arrangements and design, only doing it will give you the confidence and intimate knowledge of the art that will produce an authentic result.