The 'Astonishingly Complex' Japanese Art of Origami
Michael G. LaFosse has been an origami artist for over four decades and co-founded Origamido Studio, a unique destination for a variety of paper art and origami resources that serves as a hybrid learning center and design studio, with chief papermaker Richard L. Alexander. Over the years, LaFosse and Alexander have created dozens of exhibitions and over 70 books, videos and other learning tools about paper and the paper arts.
Asia Society spoke to LaFosse and Alexander and discussed their decades of experience with the ancient Japanese technique.
How and when were you both introduced to origami?
Michael G. LaFosse: My Dad and my uncle Norman folded paper airplanes with me even before I went to kindergarten. While in kindergarten, I saw a PBS show about origami. The Japanese instructor demonstrated how to fold the origami balloon that you inflate with a puff of breath. After the demonstration, he suggested viewers check out origami books in their local library.
Richard L. Alexander: We enjoyed playground origami in elementary school in upstate New York, but my 6th grade teacher was instrumental in incorporating paper folding in several of the hands-on lessons. Her grandfather was German and had folded paper to amuse her as a young child. He probably learned it in the German Froebellian Kindergartens that were so popular throughout Europe at the time.
When did it go from something that was an interest into something that you saw as a career?
ML: For me, it was a color spread of photos of amazing origami in a 1970 Reader's Digest article about Japanese Origami Master Akira Yoshizawa. I had never considered inventing origami until I realized how powerful an artform it was. Yoshizawa's works are still the greatest teachers.
RA: I first met Michael in 1988, and when I inquired about the folded things around his apartment, he began showing me astonishingly complex and beautiful works that he had stored in shoeboxes. I felt it was a crime to have them hidden away, and offered to help him get his works shown in public.
What initially drew you to paper as a medium for your work?
ML: As you fold a piece of art, the paper either allows you to do what you need to do, or it rips, cracks, fades, or bunches up in unsightly thicknesses. The photos of origami in the Yoshizawa article were clearly folded from larger, stronger, and sometimes heavier Japanese fine papers than were not available around me, and so I began to learn more about paper, how it was made, what fibers were the strongest, which colorants were the most stable, and how I could make exactly the right archival paper for my works of art.
RA: Helping Michael make handmade paper for his art gave me plenty of ideas for doing things a little differently in order to make larger, thinner, or more translucent sheets. I also love to blend fibers and colors to make specialty papers that are often too cool to fold.
What is it that paper art is able to achieve, that other materials can’t quite capture?
ML: Folded paper art enjoys largely inimitable qualities, including a type of poetry deduced from the metamorphosis of a single, uncut square. Paper has a warmth, an approachability, and a familiarity to us all. Paper is a great mimic, and can take on a huge variety of tasks.
RA: Folded lines, planes, and shadows can be sumptuous, powerful, or anything your mind desires. You can work with paper at small scale — even folding with the help of magnification — or as a group activity to manipulate a sheet of fiber of several square meters in size.
After over 40 years of paper making and origami experience where you have created acclaimed fine art, commercial work, and guided thousands of students, what type of projects still get you excited?
ML: Solving problems is always exciting to me. The more I learn about an animal or plant, the more I want to explore its form through origami technology. I continue to refine, refine, refine until I consider the result an elegant translation. The refining process involves exploring papers, revisiting the theme frequently as a lifelong journey.
RA: Collaborating with other artists who envision a perfect paper for their work is what drives me now. I can usually help, and I share their joy when they fold a piece of the handmade papers we made together, and it exceeds their wildest expectations. We hold hand paper-making workshops here in the summertime, when we can splash around outdoors with water hoses!
Origami is often associated with being a very traditional craft. Have you seen the paper art world/ industry evolve? Is there an effort to sustain the tradition?
ML: When I was young, the known, published, origami repertoire was small, most objects were flat, and often seemed uninspired. By the 1970s, an explosion was beginning, and by the 1990s, we began seeing dozens of new books being published every year. After the Internet became widespread, video has brought origami to the masses all around the globe. The focus now is not on technique as much as it is on the aspects of artful folding.
RA: As a traditional craft, paperfolding seems to have plateaued at the level of the revered and magnificent Japanese Origami Crane for hundreds of years. In the mid 1800s, Frederich Froebel, the inventor of Kindergarten, realized the creative power of folding for pattern study, aesthetics, motor skill-building, and mental discipline. In the 1900s, Yoshizawa single-handedly broke through the craft ceiling and showed the world how paper folding could be a legitimate vehicle of true artistic expression. His followers elevated origami within the fields of engineering, science, mathematics, as well as art. A most beautiful discussion of this later evolution is explored in a Peabody Award-winning PBS film by Vanessa Gould called Between the Folds.
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