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Celebrate Happiness Lantern | Public Sculptures by George Lee | Hing Hay Park in Seattle
Celebrate Happiness Lantern | Public Sculptures by George Lee | Hing Hay Park in Seattle
Celebrate Happiness Lantern | Public Sculptures by George Lee | Hing Hay Park in Seattle

Created and Sold by George Lee

George Lee

Celebrate Happiness Lantern - Public Sculptures

Featured In Hing Hay Park, Seattle, WA

Unavailable

Celebrate Happiness Lantern
Hing Hay (Park) is the Cantonese phonetic for Celebrate Happiness. After a deep collaboration with Chinatown ID community members over nearly 2 years, this Lantern is an iconic sign for the park, a new layer of festivity for the CID, and a monument to Celebrating Happiness transcending boundaries and embracing the power of differences.

Completely designed and built in-studio with a hybrid of custom hand automotive and aircraft techniques, digital fabrication and theatrical lighting design and technology.

Thank you especially to Friends of Hing Hay Park, Chinatown International District Community Members, Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority, Seattle Office of Economic Development, Seattle Parks and Recreation, International Special Review District Board

“Throughout the two years George worked with us for the Celebrate Happiness Lantern, he was diligent, communicative, and thorough. George demonstrated that he is a skilled public artist – from community engagement and having discussions with community members, forming concepts that resonated with people and place, to the technical and often tedious aspects of permitting, fabrication, and bureaucratic challenges – he navigated it all with patience and tenacity. Thank you for all your hard work, George!”

- An Huynh, Public Realm & Community Manager, SCIDPDA

Item Celebrate Happiness Lantern
Created by George Lee
George Lee
Meet the Creator
Wescover creator since 2020
George Lee (American, born 1983 in Boston, MA) lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Inspired by healing through ecological and cultural wonder, George works with communities and his team to sculpt immersive large-scale, site-integrated installations. Geometry, interconnection and site cultures are often central to the work. Integrating the sculpture beneficially into site dynamics of circulation, aesthetics and culture in an accessible, interactive manner is an important priority. Actively engaging people and ecologies, with a special focus on highlighting hidden stories, is another important aspect to the sculpture.

Recent and current projects draw inspiration from seaweeds, cleats and net sheds of the Salish Sea, and similarities in metamorphosis of conifer seed ovary pods and Indigenous to contemporary human development within the City of Seattle. These projects investigate the similarities of human and non-human structural forms, organic dynamic form possibilities in materials otherwise considered hard, linear and unforgiving, and the merging of human and non-human realities in ways that uncover the universality of all things on Earth.

George’s work is the recipient of the 2020 Kresge Foundation Equitable Creative Placemaking Grant (MI), 2021 Charles Payton Award for Heritage Advocacy (WA), 2019 ASLA Washington Professional Award (WA) and 2015 Crosscut Best Civic Technology Project (WA). He was commissioned by the 2016 Fulbright Visiting Scholars Program World Affairs Conference to speak on his work, and his work featured frontpage in 2018 Landscape Architecture Magazine (WA) and 2017 Real Change News (WA).