Feb 2nd, 2021
CH 10
When I read Chapter 10, I am surprised by how paper folding and paper cutting in Western society developed. The origami community started in the United States in 1958 in Lillian Oppenheimer’s effort, and it is Akira Yoshizawa brought new forms from Japan to the West and established a system for origami folds, the “Yoshizawa-Randlett system.” At this time, paper folding had already become art in only a few years in the U.S. and Europe. The paper cutting in the West started from “silhouette,” the shadow portraits. Some great “silhouette” artists, such as Edouart, make innovations and work with scissors and paper. Paper cutting is just like paper folding developed for hundreds of years by a group of great artists. They are not only paper arts and crafts, but also a book of history and bibliography of those paper artists.
The story about how Oppenheimer started paper folding strikes me the most. Like the title of this chapter, “A Wonderful Mental and Physical Therapy,” paper folding and cutting give people purposes in their lives. When people focus on arts, they can escape from reality and find peace, the same feeling I have when I am painting. But unlike painting and other art forms that require some tools, paper folding only needs paper, a general material that most have access to. Because of this characteristic, those poor, Hans Christian Anderson, for example, can also do paper folding and cutting and make arts.
The “paper-mosaic” is also interesting because it imitates the flowers, nature. Painters and photographers love depicting nature because the power and energy of nature provoke aesthetic emotion. I am fascinated by Delany’s invention that brings color and lives to the paper shades. I think that artists have to be the observer like Delany finding the similarity between the art and the real world to make inventions. It is such a beautiful process.
Citation:
Sansom, Ian. Paper: an Elegy. William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.
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