My apartment had too much yin and not enough yang… the landscape had to go

Shoppers in Beijing, where, amid economic trouble, the cost of living is coming down for many people. Photograph: by Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images The woman was sitting on a low stool, handling gently a white, gelatinous lump of glue the size of a human brain as she submerged it in a bucket of water. She took it out and pushed it carefully through a piece of cloth before transferring it into a small steel saucepan and stirring it with a wooden spoon, spraying it with water a couple of times. Her colleague was unrolling lengths of silk on to…