Singha Hon’s Dreams of Dragons

Also known as the Spring Festival in China, Lunar New Year celebrates the arrival of spring and the beginning of a new year on the lunar calendar. This year, February 10 marks the beginning of the year of the dragon, and people across New York City and the world are celebrating with food, family, and tradition. Brooklyn-based artist and illustrator Singha Hon has been celebrating Lunar New Year since she was a child. “With my family, we always make a big dinner together to celebrate,” she says, “and follow traditions to ensure prosperity for the new year.”

For this month’s Drawn to MoMA, we invited Hon to reflect on her relationship to the holiday and what the new year might bring. “I am hoping the year of the wood dragon brings more of our dreams into reality,” she says. In her story, a wood dragon comes down from the sky and breathes life into handmade dragons across the city. “The wood dragon, to me, makes me think of springtime and growth,” she explains. “Wood also feels like optimism and courage—the ability to turn sunlight and water into new life.” We hope you’ll find inspiration in Hon’s story and harness “the power of the dragon…to find healing and courage and grow toward the world we want to see.”

Singha Hon is an illustrator and visual artist from New York City. Her work is about creating visual stories set in dreamlike places somewhere between the city environment she grew up in and an imagined one bursting with chimeras and megafauna. She is currently a teaching artist at the W.O.W. Project, in Manhattan’s Chinatown. You can explore her work and more on her website.