Lunar New Year celebrates across Chinatown
BY TEQUILA MINSKY
Brilliant red floods the streetscape
of Chinatown. Red is the color for
happiness, beauty, vitality, good
luck, success and prosperity.
Under shop awnings, scarlet paper lanterns
sway in the breeze while messages
of good fortune line window storefronts
— the Chinese New Year is everywhere.
This year is The Year of the Rat—the first
in the astrological cycle of Chinese New
Years, which is celebrated for two weeks.
In spite of the Saturday rain on New
Year’s Day as well as the devastating fire
of a historic community building with
the Chinatown archives, the Lunar New
Year entered on Jan. 25 with its traditional
firecracker ceremony at Sara D.
Roosevelt Park.
Sheltered by a tent, active community
members and local politicians wished
everybody well, and during the constant
shower, presented proclamations in a
sped-up ceremony.
Then, holding long poles with lettuce
dangling, VIPs enticed and fed the dancing
dragons, and firecrackers scared bad
luck away, welcoming the New Year. An
FDNY explosive expert was on hand
among the firecracker professionals.
Meanwhile in the park, two firefighters
tabled with FDNY recruitment info.
Chinatown-raised Danny Wong (Truck
& Ladder 114, Sunset Park) described
eating his family’s mouth-watering New
Year’s Eve meal.
“My mother-in-law did the cooking,”
he said, listing garlic crab with rice,
vermicelli, chicken, abalone, lobster,
shrimp and pork as part of the meal
that the extended family of 15 ate. Some
families eat their big meal on New Year’s
Eve. For some families, New Year’s Day
is a vegetarian meal. But for all, Chinese
New Year is a time when the family gets
together and eats.
One young man who works at the
Apple Store said that his family will take
up three large round tables in a Chinese
restaurant in Brooklyn. “We don’t have
a home big enough to accommodate our
whole family,” he said.
One woman spoke from the locker
room at the Parks Dept. Dapolito Center
as she looked forward to eating with five
other family members in her apartment.
Her New Year’s dinner menu would
include soup with a whole chicken and
lots of vegetables—all home made, accompanied
by prepared duck that she
would buy.
New Year’s is a time of new beginnings,
a clean slate. People get haircuts
before the holiday, as did firefighter
Danny Wong. All cleaning must be completed
before the holiday and on New
Year’s Day only good things can be said,
nothing bad. One must be positive.
Council Member Margaret Chin
grew up in Chinatown and shared remembrances.
“My mother would make
dumplings filled with peanut butter and
sugar,” she recalled. “And we always got a
new outfit. I have to get something new,”
she said, a few days before the holiday.
There’s still plenty of time to celebrate
Asian Lunar New Year in Manhattan.
If you want to be part of the fun, the
Museum of Chinese in America will host
crafts and dance performances, snacks
and tales inspired by Chinese and Chinese
American New Years. The ticketed sessions
are at 10 a.m. or 2 p.m. on Feb. 1.
Chinatown will also host on Feb. 8 the
Lion Dance thoughout the neighborhood,
beginning at 10:30 a.m.
Finally, on Feb. 9, raucous symbols,
drums, poppers spraying confetti, multicolored
costumes and giant dragons will
delight crowds during the Chinatown
PHOTOS BY TEQUILA MINSKY
Celebrating the Chinese New Year.
Lunar New Year Parade and Festival
starting at 1 p.m. The route goes from
Mott and Hester to Chatham Square to
East Broadway towards the Manhattan
Bridge, completing on Eldridge and Forsyth
Streets towards Grand Street next
to Sara D. Roosevelt Park.
LES exhibition explores bond between people and nature
BY GABE HERMAN
An exhibition showing
for one week
on the Lower East
Side uses natural resources
to examine the ever-changing
environment, including
humans’ impact as polluters
and consumers.
The show is called
“Materialness,” and will
be at the Parasol Projects
Gallery at 213 Bowery, at
Rivington Street, from
Jan. 28 to Feb. 3. It’s
presented by the Bezalel
Academy of Arts and
Design in Jerusalem,
and features artworks by
lecturers, graduates and
students from various departments
of the college,
The artists at a preview of the exhibition. L-R: Nitzotz Saranga,
Natalie Feldesman, Ariel Lavian, Maayan Fima, Anaelle
AA, and Adi Farber.
which was founded in 1906 and has
over 2,500 students.
“The exhibition is about material,
how it affects us and the environment,”
said artist Ariel Lavian, who also curated
PHOTO BY GABE HERMAN
the show, at a preview the day
before its opening.
One of Lavian’s projects is “Plastitution,”
where he took plastics found on
a beach near Tel Aviv
and used them to create
objects related to
the sea. Lavian said
more plastics are accumulating
at the beach,
but more people are
also speaking out
about it and trying to
address the problem,
which he hoped would
continue.
Another project is
“Obsessidian,” by Nitzotz
Saranga, which
stems from the artist’s
stated obsession with
different types of volcanic
rocks. Saranga
said she researched
volcanic rocks as raw
material, and melted
and ground down rocks, then molded
them onto other rocks.
“I was really fascinated by the rocks I
saw,” Saranga said. “I made something
unnatural using natural materials.”
Also in the show is a five-and-a-halfminute
video by Natalie Feldesman,
which is a collage of nature videos, distorted
into abstract and surreal images.
The video explores ideas of information
overload and man’s relationship with
the natural world.
Feldesman said she wanted to “take
man’s gaze of the planet and destroy it,
into a beautiful chaos.” Feldesman said
she wanted the colors to be hyper-real,
“something that you dive into.”
“Toxtiles” is another project in the
show by Ariel Lavian, and explores
the environmental damage caused by
the fashion industry. Lavian created
a series of stools made of textiles and
iron, using discarded fabrics collected
by Lavian from fashion houses and
sewing workshops. “It speaks to the
other side of the story,” Lavian said of
the project.
More information on the “Materialness”
exhibition can be found at www.
bezalelfriends.org.
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