QI
The site "World Art Treasures/A la Rencontre des Trésors d'Art du Monde" is celebrating its tenth anniversary. We have decided to link this anniversary with the Qi symbol.
To the Chinese, the main feature of Qi - basically, life-breath - is that it operates and circulates according to a binary rhythm of inspiration and expiration.
"The universe endlessly recreates itself as an ever-changing continuum (indeed, one of its designations is "the ten thousand transformations"), perpetual genesis and becoming, born of a unique material - the primordial breath (or energy) known as yuan qi, which is neither matter nor spirit [?] A theoretical dynamic process, this Qi - that is, neither matter nor spirit - predates the world, and all things are but an aspect of it, a state of its greater or lesser condensation. Condensed, it is life; diluted, it is indeterminate potential.
"Qi is represented as a force that spreads out, sustaining the world by a movement that revolves, through which
it divides itself up and distributes itself into every sector alternately of space and time. It is not a
substance whose existence can be asserted in any other ways than in the forms it assumes and their
transformations; the 'instruments' or beings that reveal it are no other than Qi in a particularized form,
and when these disappear they again become Qi. Qi does not 'remain' behind the forms in which it appears,
for each is but one of the forms that it assumes, that it has become. When these disappear, Qi takes
on another form: a principle of unity and coherence that links the multiples among themselves, and that
subsists as a potential, the life force immanent in the world and that can only be known through the varied
and changing aspects it assumes. Thus we have, on the one hand, energy which, without being exterior to them,
is distinct from the concrete forms, inasmuch as it represents their source - that is, indeterminate and
infinite potential - and inasmuch as it remains once the concrete forms have disappeared, and, on the other,
the forms this energy takes and that are in fact nothing else than [energy] itself. Because of this double
possibility of settling on a form and going beyond it, the Qi 'informs 
(zao) and
transforms (hua) all things',
and this in a two-sided operation (zao hua) [...] since it defines the form assumed but also
changes it constantly."
Ref : Anne Cheng, Histoire de la pensée chinoise, Editions
"Point" Seuil, 2002, p. 252)
Translated from the French by Margie Mounier, March 2004