Auckland Lantern Festival 2020 T-shirt

This is the official T-shirt designed and produced for the (subsequently cancelled) 2020 Auckland Lantern Festival. It has never been worn.

The festival, which was scheduled to be held on 13-16 February 2020, would become one of the first major public events in Aotearoa New Zealand to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The announcement of this festival’s cancellation on 4 February 2020 occurred around the same time that New Zealand first imposed restrictions on travellers entering the country from China. In subsequent weeks, many other events, including that of the Pasifika Festival, were cancelled and eventually all public gatherings would be banned as the nation went into Alert Level 4 lockdown.

Auckland Lantern Festival
The Auckland Lantern Festival was first organised by the Asia New Zealand Foundation as a one-day showcase of second-land lanterns from Singapore at Albert Park in 2000. It has since developed into multi-day event held at Auckland Domain with stalls and performances attracting over 200,000 attendees. Its cancellation in 2020 was the first time that the event had ever been cancelled in its 21-year history.

The event’s cancellation was partially informed by the concerns of stakeholders connected with the Festival, some with connections to China, who felt it would be inappropriate to celebrate the Lunar New Year here while the death toll was mounting overseas. Though New Zealand did not record its first case of Covid-19 until 28 February, a number of New Zealanders following news of developments in Asia, including many of Asian heritages, also expressed strong concerns about the potential for the virus to enter New Zealand and spread through public celebrations around this time.

This T-shirt features a distinctive stylised rat image, a reference to the fact that 2020 corresponded to the Year of the Rat in the zodiac calendar. The rat, one of twelve animals represented in the Chinese twelve-year zodiac cycle, is associated with wealth and surplus as well as intelligence, adaptability and resilience. The rat's instinct for 'surviving calamities' was occasionally referenced in international news articles about the Covid-19 pandemic around this time.