SPACE
- A Simulation of Chinese New Year
Why
As an international student, I sometimes felt losing belonging especially on the days of my home country’s traditional festivals. My family and friends in China usually send a lot of photos on their social network on those days, sharing their happiness state. While me, here, in another country, far away from them, could only send text messages to show my festival greetings. Though there are many Chinese students here in UCSD and we usually celebrate our traditional festivals together, we still find lacking the festival atmosphere. The reason we do not have the feeling of festival may be that many conventional customs cannot achieve here. For example, fireworks and firecrackers are not allowed and also it is hard to buy decoration materials like couplets or lanterns.
If there exists a place, where the surrounding environment is sufficient enough to provide a festival feeling, maybe we would not worry about how we could celebrate our traditional festivals far away from home.
Modern techniques not only allow me to create a space that flexible and movable, but also it could protect and remodel the traditional conventions which already fade away due to the fast development of technology. For example, even in China, nowadays when Spring Festival is coming, fireworks and firecrackers are forbidden in many big cities due to safety and environment issues. Losing this interesting activity results that many young people in China now pay less attention to Spring Festival. Therefore, I made the fireworks by projecting animations with sounds, which is both environmentally friendly and giving a sense of New Year.
My project is designed for everyone. It has different meanings to different groups of people. For our Chinese International students, this may be a place that reminds us of the happy time with family and friends or an idea that we could use to celebrate festivals in the future. For people in China, this could be a new way to reproduce the conventions about extinction and a reminder of keeping the traditional celebrations. For other people, never experienced Chinese Spring Festival or even unfamiliar with it, this could be a playful and real-experiencing introduction to my traditional cultural and an exciting way to promote the unique conventions to the world.