Golden Week – Full Moon Festival and National Day
Here are images of the unidentified cicada found near Vault 1 of the Terracotta Army in Xi’an. I have managed to photograph and scan this cicada [thanks to Brian and Hong Mei at Red Gate]. Scans are more interesting photographic images, I find, because of their limited depth of field and the effects this limitation has on the image. This is the advantage of finding dead insects over using insects from scientific/museum collections. The difficulty is that it is hard to find dead insects in good nick. A local artist, Huang Xu, has used the scanner to great effect in his ‘Plastic Bag’ series, which was shown at Li Gang’s Pickled Art Factory this month.
I contacted Ai-Ping by email and will wait for his identification expertise. He is very busy at the moment, particularly because of Golden Week, which starts on Monday 1st October – National Day. This week – Golden Week – is a holiday for all. Last week also had the Full Moon Festival on 25th September, which is the traditional mid-Autumn festival. This festival falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, and is around the time of the autumn equinox. This celebration can be traced as far back as to the ancient Xia and Shang Dynasties [2000 BC – 1066 BC]. National Day is a far more recent celebration, and every 19 years it falls on the same day as Full Moon Festival. National Day celebrates the founding of the People’s Republic of China as announced by Mao Zedong on 1st October 1949 on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tian’anmen Square.
