WV Chinese teacher Ping Moroney preps for Saturday Lunar New Year performance, local art show open through February
To celebrate Lunar New Year (Year of the Snake), Warwick Valley High School and Middle School Chinese language teacher Dr. Ping Xu Moroney will be leading one of the nearly two dozen performances scheduled for the 2025 Spring Festival Gala. The event is being hosted by the Orange County Chinese Association (OCCA) on Saturday, February 1, to celebrate Chinese culture and our local Chinese community. The day will include performances by local Chinese groups, community members, and Chinese school teachers and students from the area.
The event is taking place at Chester High School and is open to all. Find attendance information through the OCCA website: www.occany.org.
For her performance, Dr. Ping will be live painting a picture of the snake, the Chinese zodiac symbol of the coming year. She will be accompanied on stage by a parent of two of her Warwick Valley Middle School students, along with her own daughter and her son.
“On one side, Ms. Nana Cui — who has two boys in my seventh and eighth grade classes — will be dressed in traditional Chinese clothing, singing and also narrating [the process] for me,” said Dr. Ping, and added that her own daughter and her son will be on stage to hold and hand her supplies as she works.
This is the first year that public schools in New York have the day off in observance of this major holiday. As the number of Chinese immigrants in America has grown, so has the prevalence of Lunar New Year celebrations. As Dr. Ping pointed out, Lunar New Year is not just a major holiday for Chinese people, but for all Asians.
“Singapore, Korean, Japanese, Malaysia, Vietnam, they all celebrate Lunar New Year,” said Dr. Moroney. “In Chinese, we call it the spring holiday. It’s the annual welcoming of spring and the end of winter.”
While it is exciting that New York has chosen to observe Lunar New Year in this way, in China Lunar New Year is about as big as a holiday can get, as suggested by the way they observe it.
“In China, we’re off for two weeks; no school, no work, nothing,” Dr. Ping exclaimed. “It’s the biggest day! People travel back to their home towns, and we have many traditions, like eating oranges, lighting fire crackers.”
After her live painting performance on Saturday, Dr. Ping will be available to help event attendees create their own Chinese calligraphy, something she and her Chinese language students from Warwick Valley also did during the January 18 opening of Dr. Ping’s art show at the Albert Wisner Public Library.
The opening of Dr. Ping’s exhibit was attended by local officials, students and parents, and members of the Warwick Art Association and the OCCA. The event included an introduction by Greenwood Lake Village Mayor Thomas Howley, which you can watch here. Dr. Ping’s middle and high school students were there to work with attendees on creating their own calligraphy.
More than 30 of Dr. Ping’s paintings of landmarks and buildings from around Warwick and Greenwood Lake are on display, and will remain up through February. Dr. Ping loves painting landmarks and buildings largely for the purpose of historical preservation. She loves the deep history of the area. The older the structure, she says, the more it speaks to her.
“These buildings might go away after 100 years. They might disappear, destroyed to build something else,” she lamented. “And you and me, we’ll be gone in 100 years. But my oil paintings, 100 years later, people will be interested. That’s why I preserve the local buildings.”
Dr. Ping was born in China and grew up during the country’s Cultural Revolution. She recalls not having food or other necessities that are often taken for granted. She remembers having nearly frost bitten fingers and thinking that was just a normal part of living through the winter, because her family didn’t have heat. Moreover, she remembers how so much of her culture was sadly eradicated during her youth.
“It’s all part of how I grew up,” she shared. “So, when I see these beautiful old buildings in Warwick, I’m speechless because [in China] we had a history, but during my time, the culture revolution, Mao just destroyed everything.”
Dr. Ping wants to thank the outstanding students of the Warwick Valley High School Criminal Justice program, who provided such attentive and organized event security and guest experience services during the art opening. And thank you also to WVHS student Rowan Astorino (and his Video Production teacher Dan Cecconie). Rowan attended the opening to interview Dr. Ping and record the event.
Dr. Ping’s artwork hangs in lots of places around the area, including at WTBQ Radio, Chateau Hathorn, the Greenwood Lake Public Library, and others. You can see a collection of pieces from her current Albert Wisner Library show in the gallery below, and you can learn more about Dr. Ping and see more of her artwork (including some delightful pet portraits) at her website: www.pingsgallery.com.