Origami and Orientalism
How to change the course of origami history (at least, the part that's already happened)
by Marcus
Part 1: Introduction
To fully convey the depth of origami as an art is a difficult task. From a humble sheet of paper, origami artists have brought forth extraordinary sophistication and subtlety, creating uncountable numbers of original designs. Hundreds of books and thousands of crease patterns depict almost every subject imaginable. An enormous diversity of styles, from geometric and abstract to flowing and organic, have been explored by folders. Just as remarkable as its scope is its community: there are international origami organizations, conferences, publishing houses dedicated to the art. Origami is more than an art form; it is a living universe unto itself.
Yet in the eyes of so many, origami is not that. The modern art of origami, for all its riches, remains obscure outside a tiny group of its most devoted followers. Most people are familiar with fortune-tellers, waterbombs, perhaps the crane, and little else. Many descriptions of origami repeat the same few ideas–that origami is an ancient and archaic Japanese tradition, simple and unchanging–ignoring all the artistic innovation that has happened in modern times. I hardly need a citation for the number of people who pursued the hobby for a few years as children but never ventured into the depths of the art. And the narrow, vaguely condescending image of origami that most people have collected is painfully revealing:
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| Image by Dewi Brunet. Some common keywords associated with origami: traditional, childish, bird, frog, paperplane |
Why such a difference between what origami is and how it is seen? We folders know the pain of this discrepancy well. So much of our time as origami artists is spent trying to justify the artistic merit of origami to a disinterested public. Surely, we think, if we create something so beautiful, so creative, so imaginative that they can’t look away, then the public will finally recognize us as real artists! But their ignorance has little to do with any intrinsic faults of origami. It has almost everything to do with the status (real or apparent) of origami as a specifically Japanese art, and the implications thereof. To discuss the marginalization of origami is to unpack the very relationship between East and West. It requires an understanding of the political history of origami, which lingers over the whole of the art even though few have uncovered it in its entirety.
Welcome, one and all, to Origami and Orientalism.
Part 2: A Crash Course in Inventing History
Countless books, news articles, and other sources refer to origami as “The Ancient Japanese Art of Paperfolding.” Implicit within that description is a set of ideas which most people have unconsciously accepted:
-Origami is as old as paper itself, originating in ancient Japan or even ancient China
-Origami consists of a small, fixed set of traditional models, passed down through the generations
-Origami requires specialized “origami paper” specifically designed for folding
-Origami follows strict rules: no scissors, no glue, one single square sheet
Debunking the narrative of The Ancient Japanese Art of Paperfolding means searching for the real narrative. Our project therefore requires us to understand the history of paperfolding. This is not an easy task. Paperfolding (a term distinct from “origami,” for reasons that will be clear soon) is a negligible concern to most historians. Gaps in the historical folding record are large and embarrassingly common. Knowing the entire story of folding is likely an impossibility. Yet the facts we do have paint a radically different picture from The Ancient Japanese Art of Paperfolding: a history of folding that is multinational, ever-evolving, and vibrant.
Many of the “traditional” models, for instance, do not originate from Japan at all, but from Germany. A great number of simple models such as the house, pig, or piano originate in the kindergarten system developed by German educator Friedrich Froebel. Froebel promoted paperfolding to demonstrate simple geometric relationships to children. His successors built upon his methods, turning abstract forms into simple representational works. During the Meiji Restoration, the European kindergarten system was imported to Japan, and many European models were integrated into the Japanese tradition. To this day, it can be unclear which traditional models are of Froebelian origin and which are natively Japanese.
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| A sample of Froebelian-derived works. Clockwise from top: house, piano, fortune-teller, windmill, pig. |
A different Western lineage of folding does not even involve paper. During the Renaissance, the art of folding cloth napkins developed across Europe, making appearances in courts and on banquet tables. Mattia Giegher’s Trattato del piegature, a 16th-century text on napkin folding, shows a variety of both abstract pleated forms and more naturalistic representations of animals. How much Renaissance napkin folding has influenced present-day origami seems debatable, but some connections exist: the folder Joan Sallas has traced the terms “mountain fold” and “valley fold” back to early napkin folding manuals. What is much less debatable is the sophistication of napkin folds. The animal figures are constructed with great detail and care. Simple repeated pleats are twisted and curved into elaborate, lifelike shapes. Napkin folding may be old, but simple it is not–napkin folders poured immense detail into their craft.
Halfway across the world, Japan was developing its own folded works. The Japanese tradition is exemplified by the 1845 text Kan no Mado, depicting multiple origami figures of animals and human beings. Yet by modern standards, these would never be considered true origami. Almost all the models are made from irregular polygons and concave star shapes. Deep slits are cut into the sheets to generate points. Wherever the ban on cuts originated, it certainly was not in ancient Japanese tradition. In fact, folders have long noted that the rule against cuts is far less strict in Japan than in the West. From the Senbazuru Orikata, a set of connected cranes, to the Orikata Tehon Chushingura, a series of models patterned after a kabuki play, cuts have been a frequent feature of Japanese origami for centuries.
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| An octopus from the Kan no Mado folded from a star-shaped polygon. |
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| Connected cranes from a slit sheet, as shown in the Senbazuru Orikata. |
Folders in both Japan and Europe existed in entirely separate worlds for many years. It was not until the opening up of Japan during the Perry Expedition that large-scale contact between the two would be established. The fusion of these distinct strands was noted by Koshiro Hatori in his essay “History of Paperfolding in the East and West Before Interfusion.” Hatori explicitly deconstructs the idea of origami as ancient: such narratives imply that paperfolding can be traced in a single unbroken line from ancient China to today, with no breaks or interruptions for millennia! In truth, he states, we “cannot trace the history of origami more than a few hundred years.” Furthermore, the confluence of Eastern and Western folding means origami cannot even be truly considered Japanese. Hatori draws this conclusion based on the titular interfusion of the two styles:
“In the first years of the Meiji Restoration, in the 1860s and 1870s, the European education system was introduced to Japan. As a result, European origami was imported to Japan as a part of the kindergarten curriculum. In addition, as people traveled internationally, Japanese origami spread over the Western world. The state of origami as we know it today has been developed as a consequence of such a cultural exchange. Thus origami has never been a Japanese art.”
To say origami today has transformed dramatically since that original interfusion would be an absurd understatement. For one, present-day origami generally avoids the “origami paper” sold in small, pre-cut square packs. This type of paper (called kami by folders) is cheaply mass-produced from wood pulp, with short fibers and low strength. Kami has uses for practice or in education, but it is generally inadequate for more advanced modern techniques. Models today are often made using wet-folding, which requires paper with internal sizing (adhesive which binds the paper fibers together). Sizing can also be added to the surface of an existing sheet, which expands the range of foldable materials to softer papers with different textures and thicknesses. Modern folders create professional, exhibition-worthy models by looking beyond the materials normally sold as origami paper.
And what of the rules of origami–one square sheet without cuts or glue? Those, too, are a modern invention, and a contested one at that. As recently as the 1960s, the validity of cutting in origami was a matter of debate. An early column in The Origamian, the newsletter of OrigamiUSA, features statements from several prominent folders of the time regarding cuts. Far from a monolithic and absolute ban, their general attitude is one of ambiguous, reluctant acceptance. Below is a selection of their opinions:
“Too much cutting I do not care for.” –Robert Harbin
“Classical Origami does not use cuts or glue, as otherwise it would be a marriage of other paper arts, such as paper sculpting or paper cutting. I do not object to such a marriage but personally I prefer to stay within a more conservative concept.” –Florence Temko
“I think that cutting should only be used as a last resort, not as a rule…. I am not against cutting, however, when it actually improves the figures or conserves time or material and I have used cutting in several of my own models.” –Adolfo Cerceda
“How legitimate a cut is all depends on the instance; it is most acceptable when you could really do without it (as in slitting for ears); when it liberates something already implicated in the fold; or whether it is mere detail.” –Sam Randlett
The modern ban on cutting only became strict when new design techniques rendered cutting obsolete. Studying the geometry of folding liberated folders from the traditional bases, expanding them into vastly more complex structures. Box pleating, where creases are aligned on a square grid, was pioneered by folders such as Neal Elias, allowing the creation of organized and highly complex layouts of flaps. The development of circle packing and stick figure-based techniques by Robert Lang and Jun Maekawa (among others) led to the Bug Wars and the birth of systematic design. These supercomplex models also required new papers that were thin, strong, and highly compressible, a challenge taken on by specialized origami papermakers such as Origamido Studio and The Paper Circle. With theoretical and material advances, cuts were no longer needed to generate large numbers of points, and therefore no longer accepted as a necessary evil. It was technological innovation, rather than tradition, that created the strict rules associated with origami today.
Even now, the rules are starting to shift according to the changing demands of folders. Present-day origami creators now seek to create long-lasting, archival models, a sharp turn away from the ephemeral nature of napkin folds and kindergarten toys. Accordingly, folders have started using glue in their models–not to adhere multiple sheets of paper together, but to preserve a model’s shaping in the face of heat and humidity. The rules of origami are neither fixed nor ancient: like the rules of any art form, they shift with technological changes, the artistic demands of creators, and the consensus of folders themselves.
So with all this knowledge in our hands, how can origami be reduced to The Ancient Japanese Art of Paperfolding? If the designs in the Kan no Mado require so much cutting to produce points and layers, how can we call it folding? If folding existed in the Italian Renaissance, and so many traditional models originate from Europe, how can we call it Japanese? And if the rules of origami have been standardized for merely a few decades (and are still changing), how can we call it ancient? These six words fail to capture so much of origami, and their existence is an incredible insult to the art form.
Part 3: It’s A Bird! It’s A Crane!
We must first distinguish the flapping bird from its cousin, the origami crane. The two are often confused, both being stylized bird models folded from the Bird Base. But there is a critical difference: an extra step in the crane narrows the head and tail flaps, locking them in place. The flapping bird omits this step, and thus the wings flap when the tail is pulled.
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| Left: crane. Right: flapping bird. Folded by the author. |
Why the Flapping Bird? Well, it turns out that while the crane is Japanese, the Flapping Bird isn’t. The Flapping Bird might seem Japanese–a lot of sources seem to claim that it is. In 1885, the French popular science magazine La Nature published the first known instructions for the Flapping Bird. The model is attributed to les prestidigitateurs japonais–“the Japanese conjurers,” who performed at magic shows throughout the Western world. Over the years, the flapping bird would spread to the United States, Great Britain, and Spain, attributed to these conjurers as a Japanese model.
This puzzle has long baffled historians of origami. David Lister called the Flapping Bird’s true origins his “Holy Grail,” though I have found no evidence that he ever arrived at a conclusive answer. David Mitchell, creator of the Public Paperfolding History Project, concurs that its origins are a mystery, and advances three theories: that the Flapping Bird was brought from Japan to the West by the conjurers, that it was a European imitation of a Japanese model, or that it was an entirely original European design. But I propose we can cut this Gordian knot by reframing the question slightly. The Japanese conjurers are treated by Lister and Mitchell as synonymous with Japan, the true heirs of the Japanese tradition. But these are not the same; the difference requires us to step outside the confines of origami history and critically examine the larger world of stage magic.
Who exactly were the Japanese conjurers? The conjurers were traveling magicians who performed in the West in the late 1800s. Paperfolding in fact has a long history in stage magic: models such as the Troublewit or the Buddha Papers were long known as conjuring tricks. Magicians also wrote some early books on recreational folding, such as “Fun with Paperfolding” by Willam Murray and Francis Rigney or “Houdini’s Paper Magic” (likely ghostwritten by another magician, rather than Houdini himself). Japanese magicians contributed to this tradition by bringing their own folding to magic shows, coinciding with the trend of Japonisme that occurred shortly after the opening of the country. That the Flapping Bird has its origins in magic is not in and of itself unusual.
What origami historians tend to overlook is the long history of Orientalism in magic. Christopher Goto-Jones analyzes the means by which stage magic created narratives of an exotic, tradition-bound Asia. The “golden age of magic” occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coinciding with Western imperial expansion into the East. Popular stories abounded in the West of encounters with primitive cultures in far-off Oriental lands, which stage magicians exploited to lend their shows a fantastic element. Many European and American magicians adopted “Oriental” personas by appropriating the cultures of Arabia, India, China, or Japan. Magicians who were genuinely Asian were compelled to self-Orientalize, performing as exoticized caricatures of themselves in order to attract Western viewers. By locating magic in Asia, according to Goto-Jones, Western audiences could “retain their faith in their own progressive, industrial modernity while enjoying the fantasy that magic continued to thrive in the ‘mysterious East.’”
Whether the Flapping Bird was actually created by the Japanese may never be known. More relevant, and less debatable, is that it was not created for the Japanese. It occupies the same place as the magician William Robinson, who dressed like a Chinese mandarin on stage and performed under the stage name Chung Ling Soo–a name ripped off from a real Chinese magician, Ching Ling Foo. Robinson, who had previously performed as the Egyptian mystic Achmed Ben Ali, attended one of Ching Ling Foo’s shows and realized there was a new, untapped kind of Oriental aesthetic for him to appropriate. His performances indeed became so popular that when Foo challenged him to prove he was Chinese in a magic contest, the sponsors of the contest simply ignored Foo’s demand, accepting Robinson as the “real” Chinese magician. “[Ching Ling Foo] stood for the mundane Orient itself as it confronted the magical Orient, which was created in the theatres of London, Paris, and New York by white, Western men,” Goto-Jones writes. “And in that conjured reality, it was Soo not Foo who was the most authentic.”
Part 4: Myth and Consequences
In time, stage magic would shift away from the overt use of Orientalist aesthetics. Orientalism in origami, however, remains to this day. While other traditions–Froebel’s kindergarten folds, Renaissance napkin folding, the Kan no Mado–may provide a technical foundation for folding, it was stage magicians that largely created the modern origami community. Early folders such as Robert Harbin and Gershon Legman gained an interest in paperfolding through their expertise in magic. Magicians spread origami through books and television and influenced the pioneering generation of Western folders. But with this effort came Orientalism, and the assumptions contained within.
Harbin’s 1956 book Paper Magic was a seminal origami text, described by David Lister as “the first time anyone had written about paperfolding in such a comprehensive manner.” It introduced a coherent diagramming language to the West and established many basic folding maneuvers that we now take for granted. It also provides multiple examples of Orientalist thinking. In the bibliography, Harbin cites numerous books by British, American, German, French, and Spanish authors, but none by the Japanese. He briefly makes note of a “very long list” of Japanese sources but declines to give any of their names. The flattening of Asian individuality, a common Orientalist trope, is well and truly present here. The Flapping Bird appears in the book, described as a “Japanese masterpiece,” while the crane is nowhere to be found–a model which looks suspiciously similar to it is labeled as a Stork and is said to be Chinese. The illusion is once again more authentic than reality.
Paper Magic was an influential book, spurring such figures as Sam Randlett and George Rhoads to start composing their own origami works. Its influence was also felt in realms beyond composition. Here is a tangential question: why is paperfolding called by the Japanese name “origami” in English? It was primarily due to the efforts of Lillian Oppenheimer, founder of OrigamiUSA, who read in Paper Magic that folding originated in Japan. Oppenheimer deemed the English word paperfolding “much too uninteresting,” and upon discovering the Japanese term, decided to call it by a more attractive-sounding name. By the same logic that Houdini renamed his Water Torture Cell trick to the Chinese Water Torture Cell, and his needle-swallowing trick to the East Indian Needle Trick, paperfolding thus became known as origami. Oppenheimer was interested in Japanese-ness only as an aesthetic, to give paperfolding an exotic novelty. She may not have been a magician, but she shared their values, and thus Orientalism further spread its reach.
The Art of Origami by Samuel Randlett establishes yet another link in the Orientalist chain. The written introduction to the book, contributed by Edward Kallop, conceives of Japanese folding as a spiritual, mystic ritual, with creations such as “the crane and tortoise, both symbols of good fortune and longevity of life, the carp, symbolic of persistency and aspiration, and the frog, an emblem of love and fertility.” The book also makes a great deal of the rules and etiquette of Japanese society, citing the folded noshi gifts as proof of a quintessential Japanese characteristic, “adherence to ceremony prescribed by tradition.” This is contrasted with the utilitarian, scientific, Western relationship with folding, known to the “scientific mind of Leonardo da Vinci” and the “architects and designers trained in the Bauhaus tradition.” The Art of Origami sets the East and West against each other in accordance with Orientalism and even alludes to some of the beliefs making up The Ancient Japanese Art of Paperfolding.
Harbin’s Secrets of Origami, a follow-up and sequel to Paper Magic, offers some improvement by citing actual Japanese folders (and correctly identifying the crane as Japanese), but Orientalism still lingers in other ways. The book contains both Japanese and Western models, but whole sections are devoted to individual Western creators, while most of the Japanese models are lumped in under the “traditional” label. Of the thirty models in the book of Japanese origin, only six have their creators explicitly named. Some bear the names of their Western “discoverers,” thus further pushing the Japanese out of what is allegedly their own art! Even the title betrays an Orientalist attitude: the deepest, most secret traditions of the Japanese have been uncovered at last by the brave adventurer Harbin.
Some readers may raise an objection: if the West only saw Japanese folding as ancient and traditional, what about Yoshizawa? Didn’t Harbin and other Westerners revere his originality? Akira Yoshizawa was indeed a creator of many original models, recognized early on as “far and away the greatest folder in the world” by Gershon Legman in Paper Magic. But one exception does not disprove a social structure like Orientalism. Indeed, Yoshizawa’s superhuman reputation seems to come at the expense of the entire rest of the Japanese folding tradition. Secrets of Origami, which contains many profiles of individual origami artists, does give one to Yoshizawa–the only profile of a Japanese folder in the book. This idea would propagate down into successive generations of folders: Peter Engel in Origami from Angelfish to Zen writes that Yoshizawa “…unlike other Japanese, seemed to value innovation over imitation.” Other Japanese folders are stuck repeating the same models endlessly, and Yoshizawa is divorced from his own tradition and framed as the one “good Japanese.”
The early folding pioneers–Harbin, Oppenheimer, Randlett, and others–may well have possessed a genuine desire to understand Japanese culture. That itself should be celebrated. But Orientalism continues regardless. In the words of Edward Said himself: “[Orientalism] provided the Orient with sympathetic European students, genuinely interested in such matters as Sanskrit grammar, Phoenician numismatics, and Arabic poetry. Yet–and here we must be very clear–Orientalism overrode the Orient.” It should be clear to us that Japanese folding can be added to Said’s list. The folding pioneers, descended from the magicians, accepted Orientalism without questioning and thus tainted their own curiosity with the mindset of the colonizer.
The world that early Western folders created was one without room for Japanese agency. The Japanese could have a tradition and an aesthetic–they could never have their own experiences or personalities from which to make art. In their attempt to popularize origami through exoticism, the founders of modern origami ironically sabotaged the very artistic potential inherent within it. They ensured that the Western world would see origami as an alien, second-rate art they could not empathize with. Are we surprised, then, that the ignorance of origami is so commonplace? Are we surprised that origami remains stereotyped as the flapping bird, the jumping frog, the paper airplane? Folders in the West have developed the art beyond these pioneers, but they have yet to truly confront Orientalism. And it remains with us to this day, even as a dramatic transformation in origami has taken place.
Part 5: Everything is Awesome
In Everything is Awesome, I mentioned that the virtuoso’s motivation seems less internal than it does external. Virtuosity is first and foremost a performance. And what kind of performance is it? The virtuoso seeks to wow an audience with otherworldly stunts, to create things so complex that they seem to defy the laws of reality. Virtuoso folders attempt to transcend the medium itself with works so complex that audiences can’t believe they are made of paper. The appeal of virtuosity is that with a sufficient amount of technical skill, a folder can appear to do the impossible. Virtuosity is, in other words, a magic trick.
Gerardo Gacharná Ramirez writes that the purpose of complexity in origami is to clarify the subject of a model: “With [complex models], origamists have the best chance of communicating successfully with the observers. The fold is shouting what the model is and the observers are hearing it loud and clear.” But why is transparency a desired attribute in the first place? Why must origami, as it becomes more mechanically complex, become interpretively simple? The answer is that the Orientalism of the magicians still remains–origami must be stripped of its nuance and made instantly digestible. Origami, even complex origami, is still not permitted to express sophisticated ideas and emotions. Without having developed a liberatory consciousness, folders can do little but accept the Orientalist idea of origami. They may embrace technological changes, but social changes remain out of reach.
Few individuals today would seriously entertain that Indian yogis or Chinese boxers can literally perform magic. As the margins of the West have been more thoroughly studied, the idea that Asians might possess hidden supernatural abilities has lost its credulity. Yet magic per se is not required to maintain Orientalism. As Japan, China, and other Asian countries have industrialized, a new “techno-Orientalism” has emerged in response. Instead of savage and primitive, Asian nations are now stereotyped as technologically advanced and futuristic. This does not put them on equal footing with the West, however–their technological prowess is seen as proof that Asians are detached and unfeeling, a horde of mindless drones threatening to take over the West. The aesthetic has changed; the denigration of Asia has not.
The rise of complex origami has triggered that very same techno-Orientalism. One might naïvely assume that the stereotype of origami is merely “all origami is childish and therefore simple.” The obvious solution is to make all origami complex! Hence the Joisel imitators and bug enthusiasts. But this just promises to create a second, equally demeaning stereotype: origami is full of shock and awe but ultimately soulless, still lacking in genuine artistic merit. This makes Orientalism a bifurcated institution. The ignorance of complexity and the fetishization of complexity are not opposing forces: they are one and the same, working together to deny origami its genuine artistic power.
The true distinguishing feature of anti-Orientalist origami is not simplicity or complexity, but internality–origami whose first priority is expressing its own feelings and opinions, rather than satisfying the preconceived notions of an audience. And in the past, I have named some folders whose work I believe possesses such internality. But such efforts are a distraction from the real point. The exact number of individuals who are capable of this, and who in particular they may be, is irrelevant so long as Orientalism continues to exist. As with the case of Yoshizawa, noting a few individual designers that happen to break out of these boundaries merely reaffirms Orientalism as the status quo. It is the entirety of folding, with zero exceptions, that needs to be liberated from the stereotypes created by Orientalism.
Part 6: The Woke Folders Are Coming
If the virtuoso will not save origami from Orientalism, who will? I make no claim that it will be myself. That I have come to these realizations is no guarantee that my words will have an impact. Orientalism is a social phenomenon which requires collective action to dismantle. My job at the moment consists of a lot of reading and some occasional writing, but neither of those is particularly useful without action. So this last chapter will discuss action, with the disclaimer that this is not the final word on the subject. Let this inspire you to come up with your own ideas, and to help build a truly anti-Orientalist origami.
A few folders have come close to identifying Orientalism as the main force hampering the recognition of origami, but their solutions tend to fall short of abolishing it. Dewi Brunet, for instance, proposes that folders should abandon the term “origami” entirely, arguing it is too tied up with childish imagery. While tempting, such a move would likely further marginalize the Japanese–the first and greatest victims of Orientalism in origami–by insinuating that Western folding is a superior art form. Koshiro Hatori, as previously mentioned, has broken down the image of origami as ancient, but takes a bewilderingly neutral stance on the “cultural exchange” of the Meiji Restoration and the forced Westernization of Japan, leaving a gaping Orientalism-sized hole in his work. These individuals have done necessary thinking, and they should not be disregarded outright. The task remains to accept their shortcomings and build on them.
I imagine, for one, that origami could become a form of activism in and of itself. It's not like origami is incapable of expressing political issues: Jeremy Shafer and Bernie Peyton have created numerous artworks with environmentalist themes. Or take an artist like Nguyen Nam Son, who has used his artwork to help preserve traditional Vietnamese papermaking. Vietnamese dó paper has seen use in origami models for its high strength (similar to Japanese kozo and gampi papers). Thus origami can become a method of preserving cultural heritage. Even virtuoso origami has occasionally taken up a political message: Chris Conrad’s “Late Capitalist Adulthood” series addresses themes of alienation and climate crisis.
I must of course mention Tsuru for Solidarity again, which has extended the peace metaphor of the crane made famous by Sadako Sasaki. Their organization explicitly calls for the abolition of ICE and prisons, reparations for slavery, and a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. To state the obvious, new model design is not an especially high priority in the eyes of Tsuru for Solidarity. The origami component of their work is largely concentrated around a single, well-known model. But this points to another somewhat sobering realization that designing new models only has so much political utility. We cannot design our way out of Orientalism: it is a combination of designers, writers, historians, and organizers that will turn origami into a true anti-Orientalist art. It is the unity of all aspects of origami that has created this vibrant community, and that will contribute to a nascent origami movement.
But let’s turn the discussion back to origami. We origami artists have tried for so long to make the world care about our art, to make them see it as legitimate. I only aim to present you with a reason why this is the case. The work our community has created should be recognized around the world–the real and tangible system that is Orientalism prevents it from doing so. Any reasonable folder should have a vested interest in rooting it out. It falls on us to break down the false boundaries between traditional and modern, simple and complex, scientific and artistic. It falls on us to make origami that demands something from the world and envisions a better one. We know that origami is far more than magic tricks, more than virtuoso showpieces–it is human. What is more human than imagination? And what better use for our imagination than to imagine the end of Orientalism?
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