Year of the Rooster, 2017.
Incredibly busy junction of New Bridge Road and Upper Cross Street, in the vicinity of Singapore’s Chinatown. The Chinese Zodiac undergoes another rotation from the year of the Monkey to the year of the Rooster.
The Chinatown region is usually quite bustling, and during the Lunar New Year period, the amount of human and vehicular traffic can reach incredible levels, creating an intense atmosphere. Stalls selling new year goods pop up, with candies, preserved sausages (lup cheong), snacks. The food items are often localised by the resident Chinese population; the melt in your mouth Kueh Bangkit is not likely to be found in China, for example.
In this time painting, I have tried to convey the non-stop human activity over a period of about 3 hours, and this is not yet the peak traffic which will materialise as we approach 初一,the first day of the year of the Rooster on 28 Jan 2017. Which in itself is an auspicious number in mandarin.