What do you feel when the furniture speaks to you, when the walls grow in front and behind you, when the curtains caress you left and right? It feels so familiar, because it’s based on a normal apartment, yet it is so strange, taking you to a dreamlike space, in the sense of both sweet dreams and light nightmares perhaps.

“Ordinance of the Subconscious Treatment” tries to be an emotional experience. It bridges the boundaries between interior design, fine art installation, and furniture design. It is a collection of perceptual environments investigating the themes of mental health and contemporary Chinese-ness. Modeled on a typical Chinese apartment, the interiors subvert a familiar domestic environment with each room conceived as a spatial and visual manifestation of a mental state. This is an experimental approach based on concepts of neuroaesthetics. Intended to be a both provoking and hypnotic, intimidating and healing experience, the rooms and furniture interweave rich religious and folkloric references with scientific and narrative cues informed by contemporary mental health practices. The apartment is a mental massage offered to souls deprived of their richness and strength in grey daily lives.

The furniture collection, an integral part of the installation, carries contemporary narrative content about mental health on a remix of iconic historic Chinese forms that cognitively draws awe and respect. The collection includes chairs, sofas, floor lamps, side tables, and a twin of drawer cabinet towers that transition between the form of a Chinese incense burner on the bottom and a Chinese pagoda on the top. The embroidered patterns, reminiscent of classical auspicious floral and cloud symbols and Taoist talisman, portray stylized molecular structures of chemicals relating to brain health and mental well-being: dopamine, serotonin, sertraline, oxytocin, β-Endorphin, vitamin D, vitamin B-12, omega-3, melatonin. The embroidered texts include sentences that a therapist whispers and monologues about a traumatized person. To strengthen the dream-like and therapeutic quality, all furniture surfaces are upholstered with soft foam beneath, including the top surfaces of side tables.

Furniture, as an artifact, is considered a device that records human cultural history. Classical Chinese furniture, especially those in religious and ceremonial contexts such as Buddhist and Taoist temples, often use yellow silk fabric embroidered with symbols and text that preach historic religious and folk believes in relieving pain and pursuing happiness. The furniture collection mutates and updates the decorative content and reflects a contemporary belief in the modern scientific side of mental health.

Together, the curation of aesthetic elements in the whole project plays with the psychological tension between fear and love, authority and empathy, eeriness and familiarity, sublime and ordinary, psychedelic and sober, pain and healing, conflict and conciliation, brutality and subtlety, control and disorganization, illusion and reality, fullness and emptiness. The rooms and furniture confront, intimidate, confuse, hypnotize, provoke, embrace, soothe, or heal the visitor.

The artBnB apartment is used for guest short stays, art exhibitions, tea ceremony, games, and other events.