A Year in Review: Every Origami Book I Read in 2025

It’s that time of year again! I enjoyed doing this in 2024 and I have even more books to share with you all. For each one, I’ve written my thoughts and included a particular model I enjoyed folding. This year has kept me quite busy so there were some books I purchased but didn’t get a chance to properly read; those will sadly have to be pushed back to next year’s review.

 

Works of Kyohei Katsuta, Kyohei Katsuta

 

 It’s been a while since I encountered an origami designer who felt so much like a breath of fresh air as Kyohei Katsuta. In my mind, there are several “schools” of origami, lineages of influence that one’s designs can fall into. The most prominent of these we might call the Yoshizawa school–focused on animal subjects, naturalism, and with a distinct eye for complexity. Until recently, I was getting a little tired of this school. I thought animals were getting played out. But along came Katsuta, who managed to prove that the school of animal design still has plenty of life in it. Katsuta’s design language takes cues from his Japanese forebears (particularly Satoshi Kamiya and Fumiaki Kawahata) yet still has its own unique flair. Arguably Katsuta’s greatest gift is with faces, which are shockingly well-detailed and raise the bar for all designers going forward. With all those details, the models tend towards the complex side, with a lot of small, thick layers to manipulate. Combine this with Katsuta’s predilection for three-dimensionality and you have some very difficult paper choices ahead of you if you want to tackle these. Nicolas Terry’s tissue foil served me well in at least a few of them, such as my favorite model, the fennec fox:

Works of Kyohei Katsuta 2, Kyohei Katsuta

 

Katsuta’s second book was published a mere four years after his first one, and it’s simultaneously the same and very, very different. The Kamiya-esque virtuosity crops up here and there, but the rest of the book seems to be an effort to grow beyond his early impetuousness. In this book, Katsuta harkens back to an earlier era of origami, breaking some of the conventions we associate with “modern” complex design. Several models are two-piece modulars, not unlike the works you’d find in a beginner’s origami book by someone like Makoto Yamaguchi. But Katsuta mixes this with a modern attention to detail, using different sheets to create, for instance, a puffin with black and white feathers and orange feet. Some of these were seen in the first book but I feel they truly grow into their own here. The more complex single-sheet models are still around, and they’re just as innovative as in the first book. Of all of them, the Tiger is probably the most intriguing (seriously, go check it out), but since I haven’t gotten around to folding it, here’s that two-sheet puffin:

Origami Double, Korea Origami Association

 

The Korean Wave has seemingly hit every aspect of our popular culture, from food to music to television shows. It was only a matter of time before Korean origami came onto the scene as well. This is the first of three books I’ve selected from the Korea Origami Association, out of a substantial body of recent publications. Origami Double is one of their more accessible works, notable for its gimmick: every subject in the book gets two interpretations, one simple and abstract, one more complex and naturalistic. The easy versions are best for intermediate folders; the complex ones are sometimes only slightly harder than the easy ones but can have surprising spikes in difficulty. Inevitably, this work will bear comparison with similar Japanese books (e.g. Origami Aquarium from last year’s review), which I’ll just get out of the way here. Unlike JOAS, the KOA doesn’t appear to employ an English translator, as the text of the books is entirely in Korean. If you–like myself–can’t read Korean, you’ll be folding diagrams with no verbal instructions, never an easy task. On the plus side, the books are thinner and considerably easier to keep open, which is an advantage over the Japanese ones. In any case, the price tag (around $40 per book) is equally absurd no matter which country it comes from. Here’s two versions of a moth by Kim Jin Woo and Maeng Hyong Kyu:

 

Ancient Life Origami/Wild Amazonia Origami, Korea Origami Association

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m lumping these two together because while the models have different themes, the overall style and attitude of the books is basically the same. Written by the same group of designers as Origami Double, these are part of the KOA’s Origami Pro series, intended for advanced folders. Naturally, the complexity is a bit higher. The benefits are…mixed? Some models are absolutely worth all the extra steps, and then some leave me questioning what all my effort went into. These designers clearly thrive on complexity, judging by the number of Origami Pro books. But I appreciated the simpler models in Origami Double, where they stretched their talents and made creative designs with a more limited palette. I wish that ingenuity was consistent through their designs regardless of difficulty.

In origami history, there was a brief period called the Bug Wars, when technical origami design was still new and people started making tons of increasingly complicated insects–long considered the hardest subject matter to fold accurately. Many designs by Robert Lang, Jun Maekawa, and Seiji Nishikawa date back to this time of unfettered virtuosity, where every creator was trying to one-up everybody else. It’s generally held that the Bug Wars started in the 90’s and ended in the early 2000’s. But I realize now that the spirit of the Bug Wars never died. It lives on in these books, in this group of young Korean virtuosos eagerly trying to prove themselves. And I haven’t mentioned it, but the designers in these two books–and actually the entire Origami Pro series–are exclusively male. Probably not a coincidence. So it bears asking: will the young men of the KOA move beyond their virtuoso era and seek forms of expression other than complexity? And might there be any factors preventing them from doing so? Only time will tell. I have here one design from each book: Han Ji Woo’s Horseshoe Crab from Ancient Life and Kim Jin Woo’s Basilisk Lizard from Wild Amazonia.

Drawing Origami Tome 1, Halle/Pere Olivella/Nicolas Terry

 

Of all my overpriced origami books (another essay, another time) this one feels the most deserving of its hefty price tag. The title advertises the main draw of the book: the diagrams are actually drawn by hand, by in-house artist Halle, rather than with a vector graphics program like most books. This was a labor of love, and it shows. The diagrams feel like art unto themselves, a trait I’ve only seen in one other book (The Origami Diagram Book, Johnson/Garibi). And the high-quality printing, typical of a Nicolas Terry publication, displays them in all their splendor. Every page is chock-full of little details–like mini versions of the models holding the page numbers, how do they come up with this stuff? But the pages are rarely cluttered or messy, and the diagrams are easily followed. The models are not as complicated as Katsuta’s books or the Origami Pro series, likely to preserve the drawer’s sanity. But they require lots of skill in curved folds, well captured in the diagrams. Terry and co. have selected folders from across the world (mainly Europe) and delivered a spectacular presentation. And for the record, yes, there is a tome 2! I just didn’t buy it because the first one was expensive enough. Terry himself is a talented designer, and I quite like his Crane:

 Modern Origami, James Minoru Sakoda

A historical text (published in 1969), and a fascinating one at that. “Origami for adults” is sort of the tagline, as Sakoda in the foreword writes about the distinction between origami for play and origami as a mature artistic endeavor. While not plunging into the depths that, say, Peter Engel’s Origami from Angelfish to Zen does, the foreword to Modern Origami contains an early example of a folder writing seriously about the nature of the art, and you all know that’s something I appreciate. In terms of the models themselves, Sakoda’s aesthetic is highly angular and abstract, a novelty even in today’s origami scene. About half the book is derived from a single base, the Eight-Pointed Star, showing Sakoda’s ability to manipulate a small amount of material into seemingly endless forms. Some models only questionably resemble their subjects (most notably a series of three-legged animals, a sign of the times if there ever was one) but others capture them with accuracy and, more importantly, personality. And for the foil paper enthusiasts out there, rejoice! Sakoda was an early proponent of foil paper and it suits many of his works effectively. This fox has such an attitude and I love it:

Origami Collection 2025, OrigamiUSA

From the oldest to the newest! This book was a gift from the OrigamiUSA 2025 convention, which I wrote about here. Now, I don’t usually review convention books because it’s hard to find distinguishing features in them. The range of difficulty? Easy to hard, as always. The quality of the diagrams? Some great and some bizarre, as always. (Origami-dan members who attended the convention will remember one of the truly baffling ones!) The problem is that the purpose of convention books is precisely what makes them hard to talk about individually: their diversity. We’re here for the same reason every time, to learn about new designers and see if we like their work. So whose works do I like? Well, Nicolas Terry returns with no less than four models, two simple and two more intermediate. Manuel Arroyo has a dollar bill giraffe that bears a striking resemblance to my own Deer from the 2023 PCOC book. Jaime Niño’s simple Swan gets a lot of mileage out of just 12 steps. But as a chemist, I have to give a shoutout to Haichen Liu’s Zinc (someone do the other 117 elements, quick!).