Be Like Water: What I Thought About While Sitting in Gordon Gu’s Tea Garden

There is something Bruce Lee once said that has stayed with me:

“Be water, my friend.”

I had always understood it as a philosophy of life — to remain fluid, adaptable, and free from rigid form. But recently, while walking through Gordon Gu’s art space in the middle of a tea garden, I began to wonder whether the same idea could also describe the way we live with art.

Water is difficult to define by shape.

Pour it into a cup and it becomes the cup. Let it run across stone and it follows the landscape. Freeze it, and it holds leaves, air and time inside. Disturb its surface, and light breaks into a thousand moving reflections.

Perhaps that is why so many of Gordon Gu’s works reminded me of water.

Some resemble waves caught at the moment before they fall. Others look like droplets suspended in motion, melting ice, ripples, whirlpools or translucent pools holding fallen leaves beneath their surface.

They are made from a material Gordon Gu calls Amber Crystal — a newly developed high-density, highly transparent composite material made from resin and glass. It has the clarity and substantial weight one might associate with glass, yet its surface feels softer and more fluid to the touch. Under light, it does something particularly beautiful: reflections seem to travel through it rather than simply bounce off it.

You do not only see water in these objects. You almost feel it.

The coolness beneath your hand.
The smoothness of a wet stone.
Sunlight trembling across moving water.

And because water never repeats exactly the same shape, neither do these pieces.

A wave becomes a sculpture.

A splash becomes a mirror.

A whirlpool of drifting leaves becomes a dining table.

A frozen fragment of nature becomes a stool.

A stalactite-like pool becomes a coffee table.

But perhaps even these names: table, stool, mirror, sculpture... are already too limiting.

What Is It?

I remember looking at one of the smaller Amber Crystal pieces and thinking about a question people sometimes ask:

Is it a stool? A side table? Or is it an artwork?

The more I thought about it, the less important the answer seemed.

Why must it choose?

Sit on it, and it becomes a stool.

Place a book or a cup of tea on it, and it becomes a side table.

Leave it untouched beside a window where afternoon light passes through it, and perhaps it is simply a sculpture.

Its identity changes with the life around it.

And suddenly I thought again of Bruce Lee: Water does not insist on being one thing. Its lack of fixed form is not an absence of identity. It is precisely what gives water its possibilities. Perhaps an object can be like that too.

And perhaps good interior design sometimes requires us to stop asking “What category does this belong to?” and begin asking “What could this become here?”

That small shift changes our relationship with art.

Art no longer has to stand at a respectful distance from everyday life.

You can sit on it.

Put your tea beside it.

Walk around it.

Touch it.

Watch sunlight move through it at different hours of the day.

It can remain art without becoming untouchable.

Living With Art

This thought became especially vivid because of where I was.

The gallery is surrounded by tea fields.

I sat on one of these translucent pieces and looked outside at the green hills. The air carried the faint scent of Longjing tea. Somewhere among the trees, squirrels kept appearing and disappearing.

Inside, light moved through the Amber Crystal.

Outside, leaves moved in the wind.

For a moment there seemed to be very little separation between the artwork, the landscape and ordinary life.

And I realized that this was perhaps what I liked most about the experience.

It did not feel like standing in front of an object and being told: This is Art. Look at it.

It felt closer to something found in Zen: not art removed from life, but attention brought back into life.

The cool surface beneath your hand.

Tea.

Wind.

A squirrel crossing a branch.

Light moving through something transparent.

Nothing particularly dramatic was happening.

And yet everything felt unusually alive.

A Room Can Be Like Water, Too

We often think of interior design through fixed categories.

Living room. Dining table. Chair. Side table. Sculpture. Modern. Classical. Minimalist. Luxury.

But perhaps a beautiful home does not always need to explain itself so clearly.

Water brings movement into a landscape precisely because it refuses rigidity.

I think these translucent, irregular objects can do something similar inside a room.

Among walls, floors, cabinets and architecture, things that are necessarily solid and still,  they introduce another visual language: something organic, reflective, unpredictable and seemingly in motion.

A room suddenly feels less static.

Almost as though a small spring has appeared inside the house.

Light changes it throughout the day. Reflections move. What looked like ice in the morning may resemble flowing water in the afternoon. A leaf suspended inside becomes more visible from another angle.

The object does not actually move.

Yet somehow, the room does.

And perhaps that is why water has remained such a powerful metaphor across philosophy, art and life.

Its beauty comes from something we often spend our lives resisting:

the absence of a permanent form.

Bruce Lee turned that idea into a philosophy of living.

Standing in Gordon Gu’s tea garden, surrounded by objects that seemed caught somewhere between water, ice, furniture and sculpture, I found myself thinking about it again.

Maybe a home, too, can learn something from water.

Not everything needs to be defined.

Not everything needs to serve only one purpose.

Not everything beautiful needs to be placed behind glass.

Sometimes art can enter ordinary life, take the shape that life gives it, and still remain art.

Be water, my friend.

Perhaps our spaces can be, too.