Two dazzling lights shows are coming to London this month as the capital gears up for Chinese New Year on Saturday, January 25. Excitement is buzzing for the event, which will see billions of East Asians celebrating the incoming Year of the Snake, a time for reflection, spiritual growth and transformation, with events scheduled across the capital throughout the last week of January and beginning of February.
Besides an enormous dragon dance parade through Central London, dumpling-tasting sessions, Chinese lantern-making or gorging on spring rolls at home, London has two lights spectaculars to feast your eyes upon this month – in Canary Wharf and Battersea. Visitors are encouraged to seek them out on weekday evenings as weekends may be busy.
Canary Wharf ‘s hugely popular winter lights festival will once again adorn the district, the Canary Wharf Group has confirmed, with 12 gleaming new pieces coming to the free event, now in its ninth year. The enchanting light trail will return for 11 days from Tuesday, January 21, to Saturday, February 1, between 5pm and 10pm.
Battersea Power Station’s annual light festival is returning to the riverside neighbourhood for its fifth year, from January 23 to February 23
(Image: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Elsewhere, Battersea Power Station’s annual light festival is returning to the riverside neighbourhood for its fifth year, from January 23 to February 23, illuminating those dark winter nights and helping visitors beat the winter blues. The free festival will showcase eight light art installations around the striking London building. Additionally, Battersea Power Station will unveil a brand new installation, Aurora, which has been designed exclusively for the London landmark’s Art Deco Turbine Hall A by James Glancy Design.
The Battersea light festival will also provide festival-goers with more than just a visual spectacle, with a number of the installations enhanced by interactive features including In Bloom by Kumquat Lab, a musical light sculpture inspired by the pollination process in plants. As visitors engage with the sculpture, they become part of a musical collaboration as any sounds they make blend seamlessly into a harmonious melody.
Digital Origami Tigers light installation is seen on the launch day of Battersea Power station’s lights festival in January 2022
(Image: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, Canary Wharf’s Winter Lights is now an annual tradition for many Londoners, and the festival is set to transform Canary Wharf into a luminous landscape. The festival will explore the “transformative and otherworldly” qualities of art and light.
The surreal line-up at Canary Wharf will take visitors from a towering stack of bathtubs pulsing with light and sound, to a mesmerising tornado of lights orbiting a pylon. Other works include a UK-first illuminated bird in flight, and a larger-than-life portal in Wood Wharf.
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The first of Canary Wharf festival’s two new commissions is Mirage. An immersive artwork that acts as a metaphor for consumers’ relationship with the fabricated mirage of social media. During daylight Mirage reflects and refracts the sunlight as it moves across the sky, and at night the pre-choreographed light show illuminates the artwork in an ethereal and mirage-like way.
Stitching Light, a second commissioned piece at Canary Wharf, is a sound and light installation that amplifies the lives and histories of Bangladeshi women living in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets – using traditional Bangladeshi folk style painting and embroidered light thread to tell real life stories.
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