Ziyan Xia

Interests

The things I keep returning to outside of work — sitting practice, the old systems for reading a life, and a long-running habit of looking at how things are put together.

Zen & Philosophy

Sitting practice, and the reading around it. It is the counterweight to work spent inside dashboards — a different way of paying attention.

Sitting at a low table in a tatami room
Steve Jobs sitting on the floor of his home, 1982

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

— Steve Jobs

Metaphysics & Divination

Five systems, each with its own logic for the same question.

Vedic Astrology — Jyotish

Sidereal charts, divisional charts, Dasha timing

  • Parashari
  • Navamsa
  • Vimshottari Dasha

BaZi — 八字 / 四柱

Four Pillars: stems and branches, elemental balance, luck cycles

  • Ten Gods
  • Five Elements
  • Luck Pillars

Zi Wei Dou Shu — 紫微斗数

Twelve palaces, fourteen major stars, the four transformations

  • Twelve Palaces
  • Four Transformations
  • Major Limits

Feng Shui — 风水

How a space is arranged, and what that arrangement does to the people in it

  • Form School
  • Directional
  • Space Planning

Qi Men Dun Jia — 奇门遁甲

Time-and-direction charts for a specific question

  • Hourly Charts
  • Directional
  • Divination

Styling & Photography

Clothes as composition — silhouette, texture, restraint. Photographs mostly of light and interiors. It is the same eye I bring to a chart, pointed at something else, and some of it ends up as reference for the generative work.

Visual Design

The generative image and motion work lives on its own page — Design & AIGC.