Suspicious Auspicious Fishes

Text by Anne Chen

Western luck is random, but thanks to Taoist and Buddhist influence, Chinese culture has a pervasive belief in order. We believe in the maxim, “tian zhuding” or “heaven decides.” The workings of the heavens are believed to drive each person’s fate, giving rise to complex explanatory cosmologies. I’ve been visiting fortune-telling practitioners utilizing methods like face reading, palmistry, tarot, astrology and feng shui. Feng Shui is a Chinese geomantic practice in which an environment is configured to harmonize with the spiritual forces that inhabit it. A house is a body with its own metabolism, and qi is the cosmic breath.

Last winter I went to Hong Kong to ask fortune tellers how to make lucky sculptures. In Feng Shui, goldfish and the water element represent abundance, prosperity, and wealth. Advisors recommended I keep a tank of eight goldfish and one black moor fish to absorb negative energies. At the Goldfish Market, a large parrotfish caught my eye. Its large flat body appeared to feature a blurry painting resembling two dark branches with four alternating green leaves and topped with pink flowers. I wondered “Did they breed the fish this way? Could it be an anomaly or some sort of evolutionary camouflage? Are they painting the fish?” They tattoo them. First they remove the slime coat with a caustic solution and, out of the water, inject them with dye with a tattoo gun to permanently alter their appearance. This process drastically reduces their lifespan and is painful and traumatic.

At the indoor Jiangguo Jade Market in Taiwan, there are hundreds of vendors with tables brimming with bowls, stands, and trays of jade. Jade is China’s most precious gem, an imperial favorite, and a stone of heaven. I was warned to watch out for fakes, low-quality jade impregnated with resin, dyed marble, and glass and to only buy Burmese jade. The jade trade in Myanmar exports upwards of 70% of the world’s supply of high-quality jade and makes up about half of the nation’s GDP. It is an exploitive industry with hundreds of active mines being controlled by a dozen military-connected individuals. At the market, I hope I’m buying fakes. If there’s a karmic footprint when manufacturing luck for export and profit, I don’t need the bad luck.

I made a lucky quilt, an abecedarium organized in the traditional method of Chinese writing: top-to-bottom and right-to-left. It contains words collected from the glossaries and indexes of Feng Shui books. It has 625 hand-appliqued squares, and this fall I plan on taking it to a casino to see if it works.

This project was made possible with support from the Frank-Ratchye Further Fund #2025-016. See additional images here.