Vancouver artists put custom spins on Lunar New Year red envelopes for Get Lucky Art Show
Graffiti, collage, and cutouts join 300-plus designs, as event returns to 312 Main February 10 and 11
Envelopes designed by Rachael Ashe, Lauren Elms, Jason Low, Mara Cortez, and Taka Sudo.
Get Lucky Art Show is at 312 Main on February 10 from 6 to 10 pm and February 11 from 11 am to 3 pm
THE LUCKY ENVELOPES that Pearl Lam fondly remembers from the Lunar New Years of her childhood were traditional red, stamped with gold foil emblems and letters.
But today, in her third Get Lucky Art Show, the bill-sized red envelopes—“hongbao” in Mandarin—become canvases for a wild array of imagery by local artists: think graffiti spray paint, collage cut-out designs, and handpainted muscle cars, dragon skeletons, and even guinea-pig-shaped soup dumplings. The array of talent spans well-known artists like Sandeep Johal and Priscilla Yu, Eastside Culture Crawl stalwarts like Rachael Ashe and Jeff Wilson, tattoo artists like Lauren “Queen of Vermin” Elms, as well as prominent graffiti names like Taka Sudo and DEDOS.
“It speaks to how the vibe of Chinatown has been changing over the past number of years,” Lam tells Stir of the array of artists. “There are so many working artists tucked into so many studios here, and at street level, people are making art.”
Playing off Chinese culture’s lucky number eight, she’s gathered 88 emerging and well-known artists, across multiple media, to design envelopes for a show February 10 and 11 in the old Vancouver Police Department digs at 312 Main (now a social, cultural, and economic-innovation hub established by the Vancity Community Foundation). The family-friendly, free community event, copresented by One More Life Gallery and District Local, celebrates the Year of the Dragon. It features a dumpling bar by Dicky’s Dumps and raises money for local nonprofits.
The seed for Get Lucky Art Show began almost a decade ago as Lam looked around the city’s hub for Lunar New Year and her childhood.
“Basically it was weighing on my heart and mind—just the decline of Chinatown,” explains Lam, cofounder of Dicky’s Dumps and District Local. “I grew up in Chinatown in the ‘80s, and going there was such a part of my childhood. So I was trying to revive the same feeling. I wanted to give back to the energy of the neighbourhood.”
Her first happening was an instantly-popular dumpling-making workshop to mark Lunar New Year in 2016. In 2017, she launched the Get Lucky Art show with just 35 artists, doubling that number for 2018, and adding food and drinks, hosting the event at the Fortune Sound Club.
Then life, and a busy day job, a dumpling business, and a pandemic intervened. This is the first return of Get Lucky since then, in a bigger venue with gallery-style walls.
Envelopes by Midori Haraguchi.
Visitors will be able to view the art on Saturday, February 10, and Sunday, February 11, when the giant Lunar New Year parade takes place just a block away in Chinatown (with an anticipated 100,000 attendees on the streets). Art fans can buy the pieces for $38 and up—more than 300 original red-envelope works in all, more than 70 percent of them by BIPOC artists. Partial proceeds will go to the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre and the Vancouver Public Library Foundation.
Some of Lam’s favourites this year? She points to a portrait of a girl under cherry blossoms, all rendered in intricate cutouts by mixed-media artist and illustrator Anita “Neets” Cheung. In Taka Sudo’s fluorescent-paint-sprayed piece, a panda flashes devil horns, while Scottish-trained painter Jeff Wilson opts for black and white paint, over his usual vibrant acrylics, to render a stylized dragon-creature against red. Animal motifs abound: for graphic designer and illustrator Midori Haraguchi (see above), it’s all about cats and blossoms; meanwhile, Hazel Cheng was inspired by guinea pigs’ wiggles and squiggles for her playful dumpling-soup-with-blooms imagery. And yes, some even reinterpret the classic gold-foil-on-red in innovative ways.
The event lets everyone get in on the tradition of Lam’s childhood.
“Lunar New Year is all about sharing, well wishing, and good luck with your loved ones—and really everyone,” Lam explains. “It’s not so much about the amount of money in the envelope but kind of a symbol of passing on good luck.”
Envelopes by DEDOS.
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