Yauatcha CNY Lanterns

For Chinese New Year 2018 the restaurant group Yauatcha commissioned a new take on the traditional Chinese lantern. The result was an array of handmade, one-off lanterns made for the group’s restaurants in London and in Houston.

The lanterns follow the same stacking logic as the totem lights: separate rounded and cylindrical forms are threaded into tall columns, each in its own combination of colours, and hung in groups above the bar and dining room so that they read as a single installation.

Only one photograph of the installation survives in the public record of the old website. It shows the lanterns lit in the evening, hanging over the bar.

Context

Lanterns are one of the most familiar images of the Chinese New Year period, which traditionally ends with the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. The classic form is a rounded paper or silk shade, usually red, with gold detailing and a tassel. A commission to reinvent that object therefore starts from a shape everyone already recognises, and the challenge is to change it while keeping it readable as a lantern.

Restaurant installations of this kind also have to work at two distances at once. From the door they need to read as one bold group that changes the feel of the room, and from the table each lantern has to stand up to being looked at closely, which is why handmade, one-off pieces suit the setting better than repeated identical units.