Mid-Autumn Festival

Reinventing Tradition

Some say tradition is the enemy of innovation, but four young designers were determined to discard this notion with their entry for the HKTB’s Lantern Wonderland Design Competition 2013. To make people rethink the age-old Mid-Autumn Festival, the design quartet turned 7,000 old plastic bottles into a three-storey-high art installation to evoke environmental awareness. The end product, lit up with a matrix of LED bulbs, resembled the earth’s natural satellite, and was thus poetically named “Rising Moon”, forming the centrepiece of “one2free Lantern Wonderland” in Victoria Park.

After the exhibition, all the plastic bottles were sent to Yan Oi Tong EcoPark Plastic Resources Recycling Centre to be turned into useful objects. In addition to creating beautiful memories for the viewers, “Rising Moon” kindled the hope that one day recycling would become a tradition in its own right to be followed and celebrated.