What:

The U.S. Postal Service rings in 2018 with the Year of the Dog Forever stamp. It’s the 11th of 12 stamps in the Celebrating Lunar New Year series. The Year of the Dog begins Feb. 16, 2018, and ends Feb. 4, 2019. The event is free and open to the public. Please share the news using the hashtag #LunarNewYear.

Who:

Larry Muñoz Jr., vice president Area Operations (A) – Pacific Area,
U.S. Postal Service
Douglas D.L. Chong, president, Hawaii Chinese History Center
Pamela Young, “Mixed Plate,” KHON2 TV

When:

Thursday, Jan. 11, 2018, 11:00 a.m., Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time

Where:

Chinatown Cultural Plaza
100 N. Beretania Street
Honolulu, HI 96817

Background:

The Lunar New Year is the most important holiday of the year for many Asian communities around the world and is celebrated primarily by people of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tibetan, and Mongolian heritage.

The U.S. Postal Service introduced its Celebrating Lunar New Year series in 2008. The series will continue through 2019 with a stamp for the Year of the Boar. Year of the Dog is being issued as a souvenir sheet of 12 self-adhesive Forever stamps.

Art director Ethel Kessler worked on the series with illustrator Kam Mak, a Hong Kong-born artist who grew up in New York City’s Chinatown and now lives in Brooklyn. The artwork focuses on some of the common ways the Lunar New Year holiday is celebrated. The Year of the Dog illustration, originally created using oil paints on panel, depicts an arrangement of lucky bamboo (Dracaena braunii). To the right is a lozenge-shaped piece of red paper with the Chinese character fu, meaning good fortune, rendered in calligraphy — a common decoration on doors and entryways during Lunar New Year festivities.

Kessler’s stamp design also incorporates two elements from the previous series of Lunar New Year stamps: Clarence Lee’s intricate cut-paper design of a dog and the Chinese character for “dog,” drawn in grass-style calligraphy by Lau Bun.