At 9 p.m. on January 30, workers worked overtime in the lantern factory.
The artist decorates and beautifies the appearance of the lantern.
The workers and masters worked overtime in the lantern factory to make lanterns for the Year of the Dragon.
On February 6, the 2024 Spring Festival Flower Market in Haizhu District kicked off, and the archway of the Haizhu Flower Market after the lights up attracted many citizens to check in.
At 11 p.m. on January 30, nearly 10 workers worked together to load part of the lantern archway in the Cultural Park onto a truck.
At about 9 o'clock in the evening of January 30th, one of the faucets of the "Shuanglong Xianrui" lantern group of the Cultural Park was successfully lit, and the designers and the masters involved in the production of the lanterns showed joyful smiles on their faces.
On February 3, Guangzhou Haizhu Flower Market archway Shuanglong is being hoisted. The designers and installers were busy until 4 a.m. the next day.
On January 31, in front of the dragon lanterns in Guangzhou Cultural Park, the little girl took a group photo of her siblings and grandfather in the same frame with the dragon's head.
In the Spring Festival of 2024, colorful lanterns will decorate Guangzhou and decorate the city: the thousand-year-old Yuexiu Mountain is lit up, and the 100-meter lantern dragon is entrenched in Beixiu Lake; The Cultural Park exhibited 40 sets of lanterns, including "Ssangyong Xianrui"; The main archway of the flower market in each district and the small light groups dotting the flower market all have dragons accompanying ......Among them, whether it is a traditional lantern, a colorful dragon lantern, or a large lantern group that interprets colorful folk life, there is no lack of Foshan lanterns.
There is a saying in the widely circulated Cantonese dialect that "it is better to see the lanterns (better than the lanterns)", which originates from the fact that in the past, when people had little entertainment, the Spring Festival or Lantern Festival was a major event every year, indicating that things that are better than the lanterns must be bright and beautiful. Recently, the first reporter in Guangzhou visited the Foshan Art Research Society, from the design and production of the lanterns to the cloth of female workers, electrical lights, on-site transportation, and the installation of the lamp group, the whole link will reveal the story behind the colorful lanterns for you.
Touch the faucet and make good luck for a year! On January 31, 2024, in Guangzhou Cultural Park, a 50-meter-long dragon was waiting to be assembled, and a pair of elders who took their twin granddaughters to the park took advantage of the fact that the dragon head had not yet been hoisted and installed, and hurriedly asked their granddaughters to take a photo with the dragon head placed on the ground in the same frame, "with joy".
Since October last year, the Spring Festival lanterns of Guangzhou Cultural Park have begun to enter the intensive preparation and production process. After the designer decided on the plan, nearly 100 workers and masters of the Foshan Art Research Society worked day and night to convert the lantern from two-dimensional paper to three-dimensional lantern skeleton according to the drawings and other proportions, and fixed it by welding. The preliminary process was carefully polished for more than half a month. In this process, they have to shape the dragon's eyes, mouth, horns, beard, and dragon body with iron wire, refine the skeleton, install light bulbs, and then put on waterproof silk cloth, and the artist master will spray paint it in the later stage.
Thousands of square meters of factory buildings are splashed with fire, skilled workers and masters are scattered everywhere and work hard, most of them have been in the industry for more than ten years and have rich experience. Chen Zhitang and Luo Zhihuan, two "masters" who have been in the industry for 24 years, are the representative inheritors of Foshan lanterns, a national intangible cultural heritage project.
In the past two months, we have been working every day, working overtime every night, and seven or eight truckloads of goods have been pulled out every day. Master Lu, who has been in the lantern industry for 18 years, told reporters that the works that are also in a hurry in the middle of the night are the arches and small ornaments of the arches and ornaments of the Haizhu Flower Market and the Huangpu Flower Market, as well as the lamp groups in some large shopping malls.
After the lanterns were transported to the exhibition areas in Guangzhou, the installation work was equally complex and arduous, and every step was interlocking. On February 3, 2024, at the junction of Baogang Avenue and Binjiang West Road in Haizhu District, Guangzhou, many citizens raised their mobile phones and stopped to take pictures. I saw that the crane was extending the boom and the two were 9 longThe 8-meter dragon is hoisted to the top of the archway of the Haizhu Flower Market. Due to the huge body of the dragon, there is a slight difference in the direction of the head of the double dragon, after installing a dragon, the crane master had to lower the other dragon that had been hoisted back to the ground, and the lampsmith fine-tuned the dragon head before re-hoisting it to the top of the archway to fix.
All of our lanterns are handmade, so each one is unique, like our own children. Lantern designer Ou Weifang told reporters that there is a certain size error in hand-made work, which needs to be constantly adjusted and aligned on the spot. "I'm looking forward to it, but I'm afraid that one of the installation steps will go wrong. For two weeks, Ou Weifang could only sleep about 3 hours a day, and when he was close to acceptance, he worked until the early hours of the morning to debug the lanterns, if any link was not as effective as expected, his frustration could not be hidden: "Sometimes tears are rolling in his eyes." ”
At 6:30 p.m. on February 4, Master Kong Xiangjian, who also "stayed up for a few big nights", sweated and installed kapok lamps on the arch of the archway of the cultural park. "I haven't been home this week, and my wife is going to be angry. With a shy smile on his swarthy face, Master Kong told reporters that the two long dragons in the Cultural Park were made by himself for half a month. "I do this every year, all so that others can see the colorful lanterns when the family is reunited. ”
Nowadays, few young people are willing to do traditional things, I used to do commercial advertising design, but now I think it is more meaningful to make lanterns. In the nearly ten days of assembling lanterns in Guangzhou, he squatted on the side of the road with his co-workers every day to eat a boxed lunch, and when he was tired, he found a nearby place to lie down and rest. Au Weifang said that the most touching moment was the moment when the lanterns were lit up: "Seeing the lanterns I designed was lit, the feeling of excitement and surprise made people feel that all the stay up and waiting were worth it." ”
Guangzhou**Quan**Reporter Chen Youzi photo report.