Tropical Fish and Noodle Packets Over Weifang

Janice Chan's photographs from the Weifang kite festival fill the sky with an unlikely inventory: tropical fish, long-tailed figures, and instant noodle packets blown up to enormous size. Weifang is treated as the centre of Chinese kite making, and the festival gathers the most elaborate examples of it each year.

Kites are harder to photograph than they look. Against an empty sky an object loses its scale entirely, so Chan uses the air itself as composition, letting overlap and distance between kites restore a sense of size. The noodle packet is the detail worth pausing on. A piece of supermarket packaging, hand-built and flown a hundred metres up, shows how quickly commercial imagery is absorbed into folk craft — not as advertising, not as critique, simply as the picture people look at most, moved to where everyone looks.