Everything is Awesome
by Marcus
Part 1: Introduction
This is my rendition of Satoshi Kamiya’s Bahamut:
That’s not technically its name; the official name of the model is the Divine Dragon. This is because Bahamut is a character from Final Fantasy VII (Satoshi Kamiya likes to make stuff based on video games) and he couldn’t use the name due to copyright issues.
It’s a spectacular model in every way. The dragon has four limbs complete with fingers and toes, a detailed head with seven horns, and two huge wings with their own extra hands on the ends. At 275 steps, it has the longest instructions of any model in Works of Satoshi Kamiya, Vol. 1. (The next longest–the instructions for the Ancient Dragon–are 274 steps.) In other words, it’s awesome. It commands a display shelf, or a bedroom, or maybe even an exhibition. And yet…it’s kind of boring.
Dragons are a classic origami subject, ranging across numerous styles and difficulty levels. From Jo Nakashima’s “Dragon” to Satoshi Kamiya’s own “Ryujin 3.5,” it seems everyone has something unique to contribute to the origami dragon repertoire. And they’re all neat, in their own way. But neat is kind of where it stops. A dragon, especially a complex one, is like the La Campanella of origami. Folders make them to show off. Hey, look at me, I can do this cool thing, they say. Audiences tend to respond in kind. Lots of “ooh”s and “aah”s and “wow, that’s amazing”s. (I do that myself at origami conventions.) But is that all we want from origami? Is that all we want viewers to experience?
Part 2: Everything is La Campanella
Because in fact, dragons are far from the only example of this phenomenon. I’ve folded a lot of things over the years–trains, koi fish, beetles, to name a few–and when I show them to people, I tend to get a single reaction: “Wow, that’s awesome!”
To be frank, it gets pretty tiring. But don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean to attack my audience. I think this is a deeper problem within origami itself. Maybe it’s the youth of origami as art. Maybe it’s the association of folding with children’s toys: fortune-tellers and toy boats. Maybe it’s my own inexperience: I don’t have much connection with the greater folding community. But origami hasn’t moved me a lot, emotionally. The Peacock? Eh. The Lyrebird? Nostalgia, I guess, but that’s only because I already folded it five years ago. The Crane on a Plane? Fun, but not exactly life-changing. Everything starts to feel like La Campanella after a while.
Why is that? I’ve always held, unquestionably, that origami is art. Yet the point of any art form is to evoke an emotional response in the viewer–and if origami can only give one, it’s an extremely poor art form at best. Yes, art should be able to evoke wonder and awe. Yes, maybe it can even be “awesome,” sometimes. But art has made us feel so much more: righteous anger, despair, ecstasy, dread, insanity. Great art does so much more than show off. And if origami can’t do that, well…
Part 3: The Girl with a Thousand Cranes
The senbazuru-the folding of one thousand cranes-is perhaps the most well-known work of origami in popular culture. It’s funny because, as a work of origami, it’s incredibly simplistic. The crane, while not exactly trivial, is only a small deviation from the simple Bird Base. An individual crane can be folded from a piece of cheap 6” (15cm) square origami paper, and the final product is the same thing 999 more times. Yet it’s seen as the peak of the discipline, the highest level of origami a human can achieve.
Why has the senbazuru made such an impact, then? Taking a closer look at its history reveals the answer. The senbazuru was made famous by the story of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who developed leukemia as a result of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Given less than a year to live by doctors, she started trying to fold a thousand origami cranes, in keeping with the belief that anyone who managed such a task would be granted a wish by the heavens. To this day, at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, guests leave senbazuru as a testament to Sadako and the thousands of other victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
The senbazuru, in other words, is a symbol. It represents the fragility of life, in its small, thin paper cranes, readily eaten away by the elements. It represents devotion, in its grand scope and the patience required to make it. And it represents peace, in its deep ties to the horrors of nuclear warfare. Something exists beyond the folds that gives a senbazuru meaning. To me, that’s more than a Ryujin 3.5 can offer. And it’s far more meaningful than most of the things I’ve made.
Part 4: More than Awesome
The point is, I wasn’t satisfied with the Bahamut. So I made four:
I’ve turned them into the four Dragon Kings from Chinese mythology. The Dragon Kings are the divine rulers of four bodies of water: the East China Sea (in the east), the South China Sea (in the south), Qinghai Lake (in the west), and Lake Baikal (in the north). They feature in some of the most famous Chinese stories, most notably in Journey to the West, where the Monkey King steals his staff and other magical items from them.
I wanted to give this model meaning, and I’m pretty sure I did that. Now it’s more than just a character from a video game. Now this model has a connection to a culture and a religion that dates back thousands of years. In this display, there’s a little bit of the story of the Monkey King, and a little bit of my own East Asian heritage, and, obviously, a little bit of Final Fantasy VII. There are deliberate artistic choices I made–like for example, what are allegedly Chinese dragons having wings, or how Ao Shun has different feet than the others and is floating–and that I hope people notice and think about.
Which leads me to an announcement: I’m done pretending I can keep up with this “one model per month” thing. I had a schedule going for a while; I tried to post one thing a month, and I did so successfully for about a year or so. Then I started writing the essays, and in-person school interfered with my schedule, and a bunch of other things happened that halted my production for a bit. In other words, I was trying to do too much. But more importantly for this essay, I’ve realized that I want everything I post on this blog to have meaning. It doesn’t have to be that profound or life-changing. I just want to give people something to feel, or something to think about, and not just something to admire from afar. And to do that, I’m going to need to sacrifice quantity for quality.
Maybe someday I’ll figure out a schedule again. Maybe once every two months, at most? But writing this essay has altered the very way I think about origami. (Every essay I write does that–but this one more than usual.) If I want everything on my blog to have significance, I’m going to have to stop producing origami for production’s sake and put more thought into each individual post. That’s the only way I can give my creations meaning, leave something that sticks in my readers’ minds; it’s the only way I can make origami more than awesome.
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