New: Chinese Lantern Landscape at LA County Fair

Four zones light up the night in fanciful fashion.

We humans often say that something drawn to something else is much like "a moth to a flame" but we're not totally above finding ourselves pulled towards an object that flutters with mysterious illumination.

Curiosity? A point of light in the night? However you break it down, people like glow.

And nighttime sparkle and a large-scale county fair go together as well as a midway and a row of lit-up rides. But the Los Angeles County Fair, "the largest county fair in the nation," is on the fanciful forefront of going one-better-ville and trying new stuff.

So what's the new stuff in 2014, in terms of lighting up the night? It's actually quite old and very storied: The Pomona-based fair is introducing a walk-through Chinese lantern experience. But Luminasia is taking the traditional look of a lantern and journeying int the worlds of glowing flowers and bright-cute animals and, yes, even the city of Los Angeles.

Meaning this: One of Luminasia's four distinct zones will celebrate some of the well-known buildings of LA, like TCL Chinese Theatre, Capitol Records, and the Hollywood Sign.

Will seeing Tinseltown's most famous nine letters, all aglow, make you wish the real sign were lit each night?

The three other lantern-rich zones include Wonders of the World, Garden Earth, and Myths & Legends, which will feature a Fenghuang phoenix and the Legend of the Lunar Goddess Change. Several dozen artists journeyed from Zigong, China to create the bulb-pretty sculptures, many of which are quite large and well beyond the petiter lantern shape.

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The fair is "Luminasia's first appearance in California."

So does the midway's glitter have competition from the "vibrant landscape of wonder" making its LA County Fair debut? We think there's enough room for the glimmer of the Ferris wheel and the luminosity of the over-sized lanterns.

Call the new nighttime experience an excellent complement to the fair's sparkly character, with a hefty dose of history, whimsy, and local love thrown in.

The 92nd annual Los Angeles County Fair glows in Pomona from Friday, Aug. 29 through Sunday, Sept. 28.

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