The Best Things to See, Do and Taste at Sydney Chinese New Year 2016
Ring in the Year of the Monkey with lunar markets, laneway mini-festivals and contemporary Chinese movies.
The Best Things to See, Do and Taste at Sydney Chinese New Year 2016
Ring in the Year of the Monkey with lunar markets, laneway mini-festivals and contemporary Chinese movies.
Get read for sensory overload — Chinese New Year is here. Time to fill the streets with fireworks and dancing lions while you alternate between inhaling incredible Asian cuisine and watching feats of strength at the Darling Harbour dragon boat races.
For the Year of the Monkey (a sign of playfulness, curiosity, mischievousness, and cleverness), the festival will be connecting you with the best of the Chinese creative world, including lunar markets, high-flying karaoke sessions, k-pop parties, contemporary Chinese cinema, and feasting, feasting, feasting.
With so much to do and see, here are a few highlights from Sydney's Chinese New Year Festival you shouldn't miss.
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For the second year, Pyrmont Bay Park will transform itself into a pop-up food festival of Asian cuisine for 11 nights. Wander through over 20 food stalls, featuring Night Noodle Market regulars like Hoy Pinoy, Everybody Loves Ramen (selling their famous ramen fried chicken) and the insanely popular Bao Stop.
Black Star Pastry and N2 Extreme Gelato are teaming up to create the mighty ‘Gong Xi Fai Cai Cake Smash’: strawberry watermelon cake smash with fire crackers, and the ‘Hipster Cookies and Cream’: almond and pineapple gelato with almond sesame cookie.
Paired with live music and roaming performers, this is the perfect Chinese New year date.
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Chippo Creative Precinct is ushering in the Year of the Monkey with a Kensington Street takeover. There’ll be everything that a new year deserves: piles of delicious food, epic art installations, live performance and heaps of chances to dance.
More specifically, the celebrations will embrace various elements of Chinese culture. Prepare to meet lion dancers and shadow puppeteers, hear future predictions from a fortune teller and see poetry in motion at the hands of calligraphy masters.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, all the food action will be happening in Spice Alley. In fact, the cobblestoned laneway’s resident vendors are throwing a massive lunar feast. Watch their clever, clever chefs whipping up spicy dishes, while traditional dancers whirl past, responding to ballads performed by live erhu players.
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The ultimate boy band party welcomes two of Korean pop’s finest — Boyfriend and JJCC — live in concert to help celebrate the 2016 Chinese New Year Festival.
For those unversed, K-pop hails from South Korea and covers everything from pop to rock, electronic to hip hop and R&B. It isn’t all about the music though, as K-pop fuses hypnotic dance moves with elaborate fashion and hairstyles — and considering it walks the line of both alternative and exceedingly sweet, K-pop’s transcendence into the mainstream was only a matter of time.
Boyfriend, a six-member band of bashful smiles, has been touted as one of the top K-pop boy bands you should definitely know about. They’ll be bringing to the stage a mix of both their Korean and Japanese singles. The other act, JJCC, are the first K-pop idol group formed by actor and martial artist Jackie Chan, and produce a pleasing confusion to the senses with their androgynous beauty and hip hop pop charms.
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The city is gearing up to pull off the biggest Lunar New Year celebration and you can join in. From 28 January onward, there will be festivities aplenty inside the huge Westfield Sydney in Pitt Street Mall like tea tastings at Laduree and a calligrapher’s exhibition. But our pick is the dumpling eating competition at New Shanghai. Yep, you heard us.
On February 19, all the practice you’ve gotten from eating the last dumpling that nobody else could finish will come in handy. Bring your hungriest friends and settle once and for all, who’s the speediest eater. Time to start training. It’s set to be hosted by a celebrity MC but mum’s the word on who it’ll be. That’s not all. Pick up a fortune cookie at the concierge desk from 8-23 February and you might win a $1000 gift card. You can spend it on roomier pants after eating all those dumplings.
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Golden Age is partnering with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to bring you an epic double-bill of films for Chinese New Year by acclaimed indie Chinese director Luo Li.
The first, screening at 6.30pm, is Emperor Visits the Hell, making its Australian premiere. It’s based on three chapters from Journey To The West, a 16th century Chinese novel, generally thought to have been written by Wu Cheng’en. The core of the plot is Emperor Li Shimin’s journey to the underworld — and back. Li places this traditional tale, originally set during the Tang Dynasty (618 A.D. – 907 A.D.), in modern China. “In terms of the complex relationships between power, wealth and morality, we can see the traditional dynamics still at play in many corners of contemporary China,” he says.
Then at 8.30pm, it’ll be time for Li Wen at East Lake, making its Sydney premiere. This film-documentary hybrid explores people’s relationships with East Lake. Found in Wuhan, it’s a controversial scenic site in the middle of a tug-of-war between developers and residents. Li said his film was inspired by a friend’s observation that, “East Lake is becoming smaller and smaller, but in my memory it is becoming larger and larger.” On top of addressing the lake’s plight, the film is also a character study of a police officer searching for a mentally unstable person.
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Flock to the city’s best Asian eateries to experience some of the seriously tasty set menus they will be serving up as part of the annual Chinese New Year Festival. That’s right people, Lunar Feasts is back and from as little as $20-30 per person, you can eat your weight in wontons at favourite spots like Lotus Dumpling, New Shanghai, Din Tai Fung, Dumplings and Beer and Chinese Noodle House.
The more money you fork out (or should that be chopstick out?), the more decadence you can expect, with the likes of Tokyo Bird, Bennelong, Fu Manchu and Mama’s Buoi offering multicourse delights for about $40-50. Most restaurants have both lunch and dinner options and some menus include an alcoholic beverage as part of the deal.
Bookings are a must at all restaurants, so if you don’t want to be left with the dregs of the green tea, get out your red paper envelopes and secure your place now.
Image: Lotus at the Galeries.
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Ring in the Year of the Monkey sipping on whisky cocktails at a custom-built pop-up bar. Presented, appropriately, by Monkey Shoulder whisky in partnership with the City of Sydney, the bar will be open for the entire run of Sydney’s Chinese New Year Festival, from February 6-21.
The Monkey Shoulder Whisky Bar will pop-up in Martin Place from February 6-14, before hightailing it over to World Square from February 15-21. Beverages on offer will include the Monkey’s Mojito, the Monkey old-fashioned and a spin on the Pina Colada named Jungle Juice. Visitors to the bar will also receive a fortune cookie, which will hopefully predict good tidings for the year ahead.
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This is the first solo show in Australia for Chinese artist Chen Qiulin. Her practice draws upon her experience growing up in Wanzhou City in Western China and the confluence of natural and urban landscapes. In recent years, the rapid urbanisation of China has becoming central to her work, which explores the intricacies of city planning, architectural hierarchies as well as tensions between tradition and technology.
The centrepiece and namesake of the show is the impressive One Hundred Names, consisting of the most common Chinese family names, carefully carved out of tofu. This edible artwork is designed to gradually decay over time, symbolising the material transformation that inevitably follows intensive labour. The exhibition will also feature a range of photographic, video and performance works.
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Next time you’re catching up with mates for dim sum, take your outing to the next level. Learn to play an ancient Chinese game at the same time, at the Mahjong Room’s Mahjong Playlunch. Every Saturday in February, the venue’s Mahjong masters will be running three-hour educational sessions for newbies.
You’ll be sat down at a board, given an instruction booklet, fed a steady stream of dim sum, and let loose to play. All afternoon, your tutors will be on standby, doling out personal tips and tricks.
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One of the most prominent events of its kind outside of China, the Golden Koala Film Festival is back for another year. Heading to Riverside Theatre, this annual festival will once again showcase a selection of critically acclaimed Chinese movies in time for Sydney’s Chinese New Year celebrations.
Opening night is director Chakme Rinpoche’s ATA, following sightless child Tianyu, who dreams of another life different from the disabled ping-pong champion career planned out for him. Then, he vanishes. Also on the bill is Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Ruby Yang’s new film, My Voice, My Life, which sees a misfit group of Hong Kong-based high school students in what’s essentially a version of Glee.
All films in the program will compete for the prestigious Golden Koala Award, which is bestowed by a jury of Australian filmmakers. Best of all, because the festival is designed to promote Chinese cinema, all the screenings are super affordable — when did you last go to the movies for $15?
By Tom Clift with Shannon Connellan.
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Chinese New Year is coming up on February 8 and in 2016 we’ll be ringing in the year of the monkey (goodbye year of the sheep, go sleep it off). And what’s the best way to partake of the celebration? We’ve got it right here and it’s more fun than a barrelful of monkeys. Well, actually it is a barrelful of monkeys.
Dumpling masters Din Tai Fung are offering new limited edition ‘Monkey Buns’ for the month of February and they are literally the cutest food we’ve ever seen.
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Reach the top of one of Australia’s most iconic structures and then celebrate with a song. For the second year in a row as part of Sydney’s Chinese New Year’s celebrations, BridgeClimb Sydney are offering Karaoke packages at the summit of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The Karaoke Climb will run throughout the first three weeks of February, with climbs departing at 9.30am, 3pm and 7.30pm each day. Once you’ve reached the top of the bridge, you’ll be given a selection of Chinese and K-Pop songs to choose from, for you and your friends to belt out at the top of your lungs. Your performance will be captured on an eight second video – although whether you want to share it will probably depend on your singing ability.
Now before you go out and book yourself a spot, you should know that these climbs are being run exclusively in Mandarin. Still, we’re hoping they offer an English option down the line, if only because we’ve got about fifty different song ideas. Starting with this one.
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Fast and furious, wet and wild. No, it’s not an ad for a summer roller-coaster ride; it’s the frantic dash in a 12m-long painted boat known as the Dragon Boat Races. Dating back 2000 years, the race was traditionally held on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month of the Chinese Calendar to encourage rains for prosperity — the dragon, the symbol of water, was the object of worship for the ancient Chinese. Today, it’s a heart-thumping sport boasting crews of roughly 20 rowers. Grab a waterside seat and watch some of Sydney’s best dragon boat teams battle it out in this highly competitive, thrilling sport.
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