GUM Chinese New Years Celebration
GUM State Department Store, Moscow
01st Mar 2018
In an effervescence of red lanterns, lights and dance of the dragon, China celebrated its dawn of the New Year. Russia turned to its neighbour for the celebration of the Chinese New Year this last week, with GUM, the department store located directly on Moscow’s Red Square – also, incidentally, Russia’s biggest store. This Festival of Spring is being honoured in full pomp with celebrations at GUM throughout the month of February. To mark the occasion, GUM partnered with internationally renowned artist Jacky Tsai to work on the scenography of the store. A mastermind in combinations, Tsai brings together pop cultural elements with more traditional iconography.
Speaking of his work on the festival, Jacky Tsai was enthusiastic about the scale and the cultural potential to bring together two spheres: “These decorations are to show thousands-year-old Chinese art and culture in a simple and a little bit kitsch form, as well as to connect them with Russian motives,” he explained. Teimuraz Guguberidze, Managing Director at GUM, was equally animated by the potential to bring this project to life: “This holiday in GUM is to show what GUM is and what China is. This is the large-scale project, which is about new GUM decoration, exhibitions, menu, a special tourist map, and new flavours of ice cream.” For the occasion, the prominent artist created a series of Art installations for the Happy New Chinese Year at GUM festival, and also showed a series of individual works, that included two exclusively produced works. Following the festival, the works were shown at Moscow’s Museum of Modern Art, until March 11th, 2018.