The lunar new year is a time when the cycle of seasons’ change feels most momentous, at the boundary between the chilly landscape and the first tentative shoots of spring. After months of winter chill and our days lengthen once more, it’s a time for the past oft-buried to emerge again in renewed tradition, and celebrate our hopes for the coming year through delicious food with friends and family.
Across human history, horses have served as means of transportation, animal companions, and inspired the human literary and visual imagination. In current-day urban settings such as Vancouver, horses no longer hold the same function in long-distance transportation or labour, mirroring ‘tradition’ as symbolic of a bygone pre-industrial era. But they continue to toil and exist out of sight.
My lantern art is an exploration of the horse within the cultural imagination, inspired by porcelain work, shadow puppetry, and inkwash paintings, and playing on the ways in which light alternately permeates, backlights, and reflects off these surfaces. It is also an expression of joy for the horse’s resilience as a creature of the world. Through history, the horse traverses immense distances, and endures the coldness of winters with that promise of spring.
The seamless lantern shape helps create a setting where living beings and the natural world are suspended in the cycle of the zodiac and within the circular scene itself. Though the central horse figure still has the trappings of bridle & saddle, confined within the borders of the image, it exists as part of the landscape, with wind in mane and tail turning to river.
The bottom of this piece is a small homage to Muybridge’s horse in motion, the earliest captured sequence of its run cycle. Before, the horse’s movements were so fluid that the placement of the horse’s limbs in motion was nebulous, a matter of debate, until its run was suspended in a series of photographs. Nowadays, many of us carry in our pockets phones with powerful cameras that can crystallise a scene in an instant: every moment offered up for examination, easily dissected and broken down for study.
But how to truly comprehend a horse? It exists somewhere beyond these photos of its movement, recordings of its hoofbeats, and observations with our slow human eyes. Likewise, our understanding of tradition might easily be taken from any given moment in time, but the undercurrents run so deeply that they exist beyond any simple frame of representation. While this illustration is itself static, I hope it can convey the space that the zodiac horse occupies within the steady turn of the lunar cycle.
Artist and hobbyist cat-spotter from Vancouver. I love all aspects of storytelling and story-making, and like to explore traditional crafts as well as unexpectedly magical moments in daily life through illustration.
spring recursion
The lunar new year is a time when the cycle of seasons’ change feels most momentous, at the boundary between the chilly landscape and the first tentative shoots of spring. After months of winter chill and our days lengthen once more, it’s a time for the past oft-buried to emerge again in renewed tradition, and celebrate our hopes for the coming year through delicious food with friends and family.
Across human history, horses have served as means of transportation, animal companions, and inspired the human literary and visual imagination. In current-day urban settings such as Vancouver, horses no longer hold the same function in long-distance transportation or labour, mirroring ‘tradition’ as symbolic of a bygone pre-industrial era. But they continue to toil and exist out of sight.
My lantern art is an exploration of the horse within the cultural imagination, inspired by porcelain work, shadow puppetry, and inkwash paintings, and playing on the ways in which light alternately permeates, backlights, and reflects off these surfaces. It is also an expression of joy for the horse’s resilience as a creature of the world. Through history, the horse traverses immense distances, and endures the coldness of winters with that promise of spring.
The seamless lantern shape helps create a setting where living beings and the natural world are suspended in the cycle of the zodiac and within the circular scene itself. Though the central horse figure still has the trappings of bridle & saddle, confined within the borders of the image, it exists as part of the landscape, with wind in mane and tail turning to river.
The bottom of this piece is a small homage to Muybridge’s horse in motion, the earliest captured sequence of its run cycle. Before, the horse’s movements were so fluid that the placement of the horse’s limbs in motion was nebulous, a matter of debate, until its run was suspended in a series of photographs. Nowadays, many of us carry in our pockets phones with powerful cameras that can crystallise a scene in an instant: every moment offered up for examination, easily dissected and broken down for study.
But how to truly comprehend a horse? It exists somewhere beyond these photos of its movement, recordings of its hoofbeats, and observations with our slow human eyes. Likewise, our understanding of tradition might easily be taken from any given moment in time, but the undercurrents run so deeply that they exist beyond any simple frame of representation. While this illustration is itself static, I hope it can convey the space that the zodiac horse occupies within the steady turn of the lunar cycle.
Artist and hobbyist cat-spotter from Vancouver. I love all aspects of storytelling and story-making, and like to explore traditional crafts as well as unexpectedly magical moments in daily life through illustration.
The Lantern City is grateful to be held on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam Indian Band), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish Nation), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation). We acknowledge our privilege to be gathered on this land, and commit to work with and be respectful to the Indigenous peoples whose arts and stories inspire us to bring communities together.
