Let Janice Chan’s photographs of a Chinese kite festival blow you away

The Hong Kong-based, Kiwi architectural designer and photographer Janice Chan sees the sky a lot when she is admiring architecture – of course, so much of it touches the sky. Her work, in her own words, is a collage of “peach sunsets, hot concrete, blue skies, sub-tropical air” – in short, it looks like her photos feel like “fragments collected from a very long holiday”. Part of that eternal holiday is her photographic series Most People Came to Watch the Sky, where the photographer pointed her camera at the annual kite festival in Weifang, China, where thousands of people gather each spring to spend entire afternoons beneath enormous open skies watching giant kites drift overhead. “Although the festival is known for its scale and spectacle, I became more interested in the atmosphere surrounding the event itself and the people who had come simply to watch the sky,” says Janice. “The series focuses on the temporary world forming underneath them – somewhere between public carnival, observation space and collective daydream.”

While on a bike ride with friends along the reservoir at Tai Mei Tuk, Janice was struck by the fleets of rainbow coloured kites sailing through the infinite blue of summer skies. She convinced her mum to join her on a sidequest to attend the festival – with a camera in hand. The resulting photos are ethereal; everything about them are utterly pleasant, airy, even a little milky like a perfect summer day. There’s a breeze of ephemerality that makes the moment feel even more crucial to capture and preserve. “I think I was photographing the feeling of the day more than the festival itself. The timing also coincided with spring. Coming from Hong Kong, where seasonal changes are a little more subtle, it felt special to travel north and experience open fields and a sky that seemed to go on forever,” says Janice. “The kites and activity were already colourful enough, I didn’t feel the need to push things further. I wanted the images to feel bright, airy and easy to spend time with, a bit like a long afternoon outside with nowhere particular to be.”

Shot on a Nikon F4 film camera loaded with Kodak Gold 200, Janice crossed her fingers for a bright and sunny day. Her editing process is a light one, allowing the images to speak for themselves – and they really do. Simple and documentary in style, the photos don’t blow out colours or utilise a crazy flash, they allow the moment enough space to be tangible. What Janice learned during this project is that anything can be a kite. “I saw schools of tropical fish, soy sauce bottles, shin ramyun packets and 300-metre long kites stretching across the sky. On the ground, there were clowns smoking cigarettes and selling twisty balloons, tanghulu kiosks and giant purple and yellow looking birthday cakes being sliced up and sold on popsicle sticks.” The whole thing is described as a “cheerful parallel universe”, where China’s associations of density and movement are spread out across a vast field beneath an even bigger sky. Nobody was in a hurry.

Architecture taught Janice that places are shaped by people as much as buildings – a building is never just a building, it’s connected to a neighbourhood, a community, a culture and countless everyday rituals,” says Janice, who is inspired by the documentaries of Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, who have a wonderful way of looking at architecture through the people who inhabit it. “I’m usually more curious about everything orbiting around it. The photographs become a way of collecting those observations and understanding a place through its edges rather than its centre. Photography gives me a reason to stay a little longer.”