Testing My Theory

The Seattle School of Oriental Medicine agreed to hang some of my herb art on the walls of their treatment rooms. I chose two versions of each herb for each room.

I received a lot of positive feedback about how much the students and patients liked the work, how the art changed the feel of the rooms, and how much they appreciated having artwork that related to Oriental Medicine.

About nine months later I got a call from the office manager. She was very apologetic about having to tell me that one of the pairs of art had to go. They had repeatedly received negative feedback from patients from that one pair of herb prints while the others received only positive responses. While she was horrified to have to ask me to remove them, I was thrilled to find out more information about why that particular pair was disturbing to some.

When I went to pick up the artwork I caused quite a stir with the faculty who hadn't been informed of the decision to remove them. I took advantage of their interest to learn more about their experiences of the artwork. Because they are trained to sense energy (chi), I found it particularly fascinating to hear what they sense when looking at each pair of herb prints.

The herb some people had problems with was Long Dan Cao, or Chinese Gentian Root. It was explained to me that this herb is used for people who have anger. When one instructor looked at the prints, he could sense his internal chi "rise."

My understanding is that people who are skilled at remaining calm and still in the midst of outside diversions would be able to stay with that kind of chi rising, but those who may be easily irritated would be pulled off balance. One person would get so distracted that he couldn't read a patient's pulse!

We decided to test out the other herb prints to see what reactions they caused. The other three herbs turned out to be calming and harmonizing. They are more universally beneficial for most people because they encourage the chi to settle, not rise.

Any image can be energizing or calming based on it's subject matter, composition and color choice, but in this case I made all the images to be pleasing (at least to my tastes). Since there was such a strong "repulsion" to these images from some people, but others really love them, I wonder how much of this is caused by the chi quality of the herb itself. Yes, it's just an image of the herb, but it still holds chi.

I started to realize that while I may be kidding myself about the power of working with the herbs, I might also want to take this idea more seriously. I decided that if I was to continue working with healing plants, I would be more conscious about what energy I might be bringing into the space. This opened up some very interesting possibilities for art to come.