Monthly Archives: May 2013

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Seoul Lotus Lantern Festival 2013 Cultural Experiences

me at Lotus Lantern Festival

 

Sunday was the third day of the Lotus Lantern Festival, and that day is all about cultural experiences. The street in front of Jogyesa Temple is turned into a street fair dedicated to all things Buddhism. Over 100 different booths are set up enabling participants to learn many different things.

Lotus Lantern Festival crowd

 

Examples: different forms of Buddhism in different countries.

Lotus Lantern Festival Cambodian Buddhism

 

Lotus Lantern Festival Thai Buddhism

 

Try different tasty Buddhist foods, like Mongolian cookies and rice dishes:

Lotus Lantern Festival Mongolian Buddhism

 

There are also many opportunities to try a wide variety of crafts. There are more crafts than one can do in one day. Participants can make paper lotus flowers. They can craft a bracelet of Buddhist prayer beads. You can make Korean paper or lotus shaped candles. You can decorate masks or make clay objects.

Lotus Lantern Festival candle making

But my absolutely favorite activity at this festival was making a full size paper lotus lantern. The festival as an area marked off for foreigners to make lotus lanterns.

Lotus Lantern Festival lantern making

 

The activity is completely free and you are given all the materials you need to make a lotus lantern in a variety of colors. Some people made unicolor lanterns that resembled a real life lotus flower. And other lanterns were a rainbow of bright colors. Making a lantern is rather time consuming, but pleasantly contemplative.

Lotus Lantern Festival lantern instructions

It’s actually a bit more involved than you might think having to twist and glue every sheet of paper onto the lantern.

Lotus Lantern Festival lantern in progress

 

But it’s all worth it at the end when you have your very own colorful lotus lantern to take home with you.

Lotus Lantern Festival lantern complete

 

Overall the Seoul Lotus Lantern Festival is one of the best festivals I’ve ever been to. The setting in Jogyesa Temple, decked out with thousands of colorful lotus lanterns is beautiful. The parade is quite a sight to behold. And the cultural experiences day is an enjoyable learning experience.

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Seoul Lotus Lantern Festival Parade 2013 part 2

Lotus Lantern float (3)My favorite part of the Lotus Lantern Festival was the abundance of lantern floats that look absolutely amazing at night.  These floats ranged from traditional images like dragons and tigers to more contemporary images of children’s cartoons. These floats are just a select few that I particularly loved.

Lotus Lantern float (2)

Lotus Lantern float

Lotus Lantern float (7)What was interesting about so many of these floats is that they were pushed by hand for the entire parade route. There were some outsize floats that were driven by a vehicle, but more often than not, you would see a group of individuals pushing the float.

Lotus Lantern float (5)

Lotus Lantern float (6)My favorite floats were the abundance of dragons. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for dragons. Partly because they are just so exotic and beautiful looking (especially Asian dragons), but also because I am a Dragon in Chinese astrology

Lotus Lantern floats

Lotus Lantern float (9)Capturing these floats at night was an interesting challenge. I have a pretty good camera with an excellent night landscape setting. What it doesn’t do as well (or should I say I haven’t found the right settings) is capturing images at night in motion. More than once, my camera would take too long to focus and either the float passed me by, or the image was blurry. The amount of ambient light from surrounding businesses didn’t help either.

Lotus Lantern float (4)

Lotus Lantern float (8)I would highly recommend the Seoul Lotus Lantern Festival Parade (well, the entire festival, but more on that in a follow on post). As I mentioned before, this is probably the longest parade I have witnessed, and there are so many beautiful floats to marvel and enjoy.

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Seoul Lotus Lantern Festival Parade 2013 part 1

Parade marchers (6)

Saturday, May 11th 2013 was the annual Lotus Lantern Festival Parade held in conjunction with the Lotus Lantern Festival. The festival is to honor Buddha’s Birthday and this year the main festival was held May 10-12. The weekend is packed with a variety of religious and cultural experiences that are a lot of fun and informative. The highlight of the festival is the parade held on Saturday night. This parade is one of the best and the longest I have seen. The parade starts at Dongdaemun, the old east gate of Seoul and current home to a large market. It continues west down Jongno Street to the final destination of Jogyesa Temple, the center of the Lotus Lantern Festival. The parade lasts about two hours and consists of a wide variety of lighted lantern floats and marching groups carrying many different types of lanterns.

Parade marchers (4)

I decided to view the parade closer to the ending point about a 10 minute walk from Jogyesa Temple. When you’re short like I am, it is highly critical to get a good vantage spot to view a parade. The city actually sets up a couple rows of seats for people to sit in and watch the parade along parts of the parade route. I initially assumed that they were reserved for tour groups who paid for them, only to discover (a bit too late) that anyone can sit in them. Even when I get higher up, it seems to happen that someone much taller than me stands right in front of me, so I spend the entire parade jockeying my camera for a good position.

Parade marchers (5)

It was interesting to contrast the traditional beauty, meaning and celebration of the parade with the neon signs for modern businesses like Starbucks Coffee and Dunkin Donuts right in the background. Seoul is a very modern city with pockets of traditionalism tucked within it.

Parade marchers (3)

Parade marchers (2)

Tourists even have the opportunity to participate in the Lotus Lantern Parade through a special program that consists of lantern making, dinner, walking the actual parade, and the after parade festivities. The catch is that you have to register for it in advance. I didn’t do it this time, but next year I want to experience the Lotus Lantern Parade as fully as I can.

Parade marchers

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Tokyo Ueno Park Colorful Autumn Foliage painting

Ueno Park autumn foliage painting

 

This painting was the next in line for my autumn creations. I am deeply inspired by colorful nature, so for the most part, when I take pictures, I try and compose the pictures like I would a painting, because I know that I will probably want to paint it later. I selected this picture (see below), because it had the colorful foliage I like to paint, and it was a different setup than the previous painting from Bukhansan National Park. The composition for this painting reminded me of all the perspective drawings I did in art class as a kid. The majority of the medium for this painting was a watercolor underpainting  overlaid with hard pastels. The gazebo was drawn in watercolor pencil.

The most challenging part of this painting for me was to produce a sense of depth in the water to add to the perspective, and also to render the green foliage in the foreground with as much realism as possible. That required me to lay in multiple layers of pastel in different colors. Even then it still wasn’t completely realistic, but close enough.

Like most paintings, this one looks better from afar, and after I completed it, it took a bit to grow on me. Sometimes it takes a bit for me to finally say the painting is as complete as it is going to be. Frequently I am dissatisfied during the actual process of creating the painting, and I often feel that I am not producing the painting on the page that is in my head (and close to the reference photo). However, I eventually reach a point where I can’t think of any way to improve the painting and I call it done. Then, it takes a couple days for me to really develop an attachment to the the painting  and to like it.

Ueno Park colorful fall foliage

 

The reference photo was taken in Ueno Park in central Tokyo when I visited there Veteran’s Day weekend November 2012.  Ueno Park is one of Tokyo’s largest parks and right next to a major Metro stop  (Ueno). It’s a pleasant park to walk around and enjoy different museums, temples, shrines and gardens. This particular picture was taken late in the day and the sun was close to setting. I like the warm, late afternoon autumn light and how it makes most of the backdrop warm, though the cool blues of the water and green foliage in the foreground makes a nice contrast to the yellows and oranges in the background.