Kicking off 2022, the Year of the Tiger, with Async Art special Lunar New Year collaboration, liang4mouths launches her first NFT project 'New Year Tigeroar' on Ethereum.
The Tiger is the third sign in the cycle of Chinese Zodiac, representing strength, power, courage and ambition. These generative editions incorporated cartoon Tigers with symbols of good luck, happiness, health, wealth, fortune, and prosperity, as well as Mandarin pun greetings and phrases with ‘tiger’ that are commonly used during Lunar New Year.
A typical joke about Fujianese, is that many of us can’t differentiate ‘F’ and ‘H’ in Mandarin pronunciation, eg. ‘tiger’ (hu) sounds similar as ‘blessing, good fortune’ (fu), hence the terms ‘zhu hu (fu)’ (tiger-greetings) and ‘hu (fu) xing gao zhao’ (tiger-star shining in the sky). ‘hu nian da ji’ means good luck in the year of the tiger, ‘nian’ (year) pronounced the same way as ‘stick, glue’, and ‘ji’ (good luck) sounds similar as ‘ju’ (orange), so the tiger is hugging the oranges in the image.
One of the most popular Lunar New Year greetings is to wish people wealth and good fortune, ‘ru hu tian yi’ originally means tiger with wings – doubled/strengthened/reinforced power. ‘Yi’ (wings) sounds the same as ‘hundreds of millions’, by replacing the word, and having a tiger carry a money bag with ‘yi’ (hundreds of millions), the new phrase and the image is a perfect new-year wish for fortune. Other symbols of wealth include the money tree, and fortune cat with waving hands, here replaced by a tiger (afterall they are just big cats).
