Preparing our springtime papercut display, made with help from many friends and supporters
It's now spring according to the traditional Chinese agricultural calendar. And though Connecticut is still a snowy mess, we celebrated spring in the best way we knew, by eating chun-bing and cutting fun paper shapes.
Chun-bing ("spring-pancake") is the traditional food to celebrate the arrival of spring, known in Chinese as Lichun ("arrival of spring"). The ingredients of chun-bing wraps can span a huge range of vegetables and meats, but we kept it simple during our events. (Check out our menu to see all our ingredients.)
Chun-bing is traditionally eaten to celebrate Lichun. The chun-bing pictured here includes grilled chicken, julienned stir-fry vegetables and our garlic-chili sauce
Fresh from his victory at the 2015 Inter-University Iron Chef Student Competition, Chef Lucas starts up a chun-bing
In addition to eating delicious chun-bing, our founders Yong, Wanting, Ming and David grew up celebrating Lichun by making papercut shapes. Just like chun-bing, Chinese papercutting has been around for over a thousand years. It's an activity that brings together people to create an exciting collage of colors and shapes, and we loved seeing our friends morph paper in radically different ways.
We were also inspired by the recent Henri Matisse papercutting exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. His use of simple shapes, vibrant colors and childish energy drove us to incorporate our friends and the community in a similar way — by making a papercut collage display for our storefront at 21 Broadway.
Traditionally, Lichun is celebrated with chun-bing and papercutting
The Wellinks team making awesome paper shapes
We traded tea for papercut shapes with students at Bass library
Partly inspired by traditional Chinese papercutting and partly by the papercutting of Henri Matisse, we invited our friends to cut a bunch of fun shapes
With all of the papercut shapes from friends we created a new display in our storefront. And we'll be continuing to invite people to help us make paper shapes to put in the window. If we don't see you, feel free to slip one under the door at 21 Broadway.
Our 21 Broadway location is ready for spring
More stories from Junzi Kitchen:
Greatest Sustainable City In America
Liftoff
A Chun-Bing For Your Thoughts
Building On The Past
A Glimpse Into Junzi Kitchen