Spring Festival exhibition opens tomorrow

The exhibition “Spring Breeze to the Southern Greenly Land – Exhibition of the Lunar New Year Traditions of Guangdong Province, Hong Kong S.A.R. and Macao S.A.R.” will open tomorrow evening at 6:30 p.m., at the Temporary Exhibitions Gallery of the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau.

Organized by the Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC) and several institutions, the exhibition will feature hundreds of exhibits related to Spring Festival traditions in Guangdong Province, Hong Kong and Macau.

The Guangdong Province section will exhibit a variety of traditional handmade crafts, including Nianhua wood engraving (New Year woodblock prints), lanterns, exquisite paper cut artworks, carved olive pits, Yangjiang kites, hand-made glass bead embroidery, clay sculptures and regional opera costumes, as well as Yao ethnic costumes and accessories.

Hong Kong, despite being a modern and cosmopolitan city where Eastern and Western cultures merge, has retained many ancient customs. This exhibition will feature, for instance, an exhibit explaining boat-rowing rituals from the “Tai Ping Hung Chiu” ceremony in the rural areas of Hong Kong’s New Territories, as well as Wong Tai Sin divination cylinders and sticks, ancestral lanterns dedicated to newborn sons, the Hakka unicorn (“qilin”), the pinwheel from Che Kung Temple in Sha Tin and posters and flyers of various Cantonese opera performances, among other unique items.

The Macau section of the exhibition features various images of the times when the city was a small riverside village, as well as traditional Lunar New Year items, such as pig-shaped money boxes, calendars, firecrackers, fireworks, red packets (“lai si”) and candy boxes.

In keeping withthe theme of the exhibition, the IC will also organize a lecture entitled “Guangdong Spring Festival Celebration”, conducted by Prof. Liu Xiaochun, a researcher at the Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage Research Centre and a professor at the Chinese Department of Sun Yat-sen University. The lecture will analyse the five cultural regions of Guangdong Province and the various Lunar New Year traditions of each region that make up the culture of Lingnan. The lecture, conducted in Mandarin, will be held on February 11 and 12 (Saturday and Sunday), from 3.30 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. at the Iong Sam Tong Pavilion in Lou Lim Ioc Garden.