A total of 121 lanterns submitted by prisoners nationwide are expected to add more color to this year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival, which is scheduled to take place from Feb. 17 to Feb. 28 in Miaoli County, the Tourism Bureau said yesterday.
This is the third consecutive year the bureau, the Ministry of Justice and the Chinese Artistic Lantern Association (CALA) have worked together to add prisoner-made lanterns to the festival. The lantern-making program has been carried out in 36 prisons nationwide over the past few months for the upcoming festival.
With more than 700 prisoners dedicating at least 50 hours each to learn how to make lanterns, the association is optimistic that new life can be breathed into this declining traditional art form, adding that each lantern project needs a team of at least five people, as skills such as carpentry, welding and painting are required.-
Above all, however, it is the tremendous creativity of the “students” that makes their work shine.
“The themes of the lanterns are pretty much about everything,” an association official said. “This year we have Paul the Octopus, an -Avatar rabbit and Techno Nezha.”
Having their work shown before hundreds of thousands of Lantern Festival visitors could also be a significant positive step for prisoners as they prepare to return to society, according to Tourism Bureau Director Tony Wu (巫宗霖), co-initiator of the program.
“Since it’s the ‘Taiwan’ Lantern Festival, it is nice that people from every corner of society have an opportunity to express themselves,” Wu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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