2026 OrigamiUSA Convention Recap (The Return)

"It's a city of strangers," sings Marta in the musical Company. "Some come to work, some to play." I think of that lyric every time I visit New York City. But at the OrigamiUSA convention, none of us are strangers, and the work and the play are happening at the same time. That's right, folks! I'm back and it's just as fun as ever. I've been looking forward to my second NYC convention for a whole year, and it was just as much of a joy as the first. Lots of stuff was the same as last year, but just as much was different–I thoroughly enjoyed both.

Like last year, I took a bunch of classes, with models in a wide variety of styles. Reza Nagree of Origami-dan fame taught an excellent Bull that was probably the highlight of the convention for me. I also went to a class by Alexander Ross (not to be confused with the music critic, or the anti-fascist journalist) on the early history of origami, which neatly complemented my own Origami and Orientalism with a lot of new information. Below are pictures of all the models I made:

 

Heart, by Jannie van Schuylenberg. This stands up on its own with a flap in the back.

Traditional Swan, modified by Himanshu Agarwal. Both this and the previous model were part of the Friday morning special guest sessions.

  

Borromean Octahedron, by Robert J. Lang. A modular piece that's surprisingly difficult to lock together!

Eagle, by Robert Ellison. I folded his Deer last year and he's clearly still got a talent for animals.

TaekwonPets, by Ronik Bhaskar. It's a cat (or a dog, with different shaping) wearing a Tae Kwon Do belt.

Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome, by John Szinger. Exploits the many unique properties of the pentagonal sheet.

Pentagonal Flower, also by John Szinger. A little bonus model from the Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome class.

Bull, by Reza Nagree. A 22.5° design that reminds me of Kamiya. 22.5° is increasingly starting to displace box pleating as the predominant aesthetic among complex designers, and it's used here very effectively.

What was different this year was that I actually taught a class for the first time! My class was on the Leftover Strip Deer (as seen in The World's Strangest Paper Size). This is made from the cut-off end of an American letter sheet, normally wasted when you take out a square. This is not an easy model, especially given how small the horn details can get. But I managed to get most of the class through it, and a few brave volunteers even allowed me to take a picture of theirs.

My Leftover Strip Deer (center), with renditions by Gary Chin (left) and Elsa Chen (right).

One of my students did get lost partway through, but there's a silver lining–he actually made his own model out of the deer base! This is precisely what I love about conventions: I always intended the base for the deer to be a more generic animal base, but ultimately it took different minds than my own to fully realize that potential. This one is a Leftover Strip Dog (he didn't specify the exact breed but it looks like a Dobermann to me). I've also posted the crease pattern for the deer, which will hopefully inspire someone:

Leftover Strip Dog (anonymous)

Not crease-assigned but come on, you should be able to figure this out.

I also checked off a bucket list item I've been dreaming of for years by actually displaying some models at the exhibition. The origami exhibition is one of the highlights of the OrigamiUSA Convention, where all the real professional designers show off their latest and best (read: most showoff-y) works. In the face of that, my display looked a little different: the minimalist Twenty-Four Preludes were front and center, with a few of my earlier works displayed to the side. Looking at all of this stuff side by side, I think I might just be a miniaturist by nature. That isn't ideal if you're trying to exhibit stuff, but at least I compensated for the size of my models with volume.

Basically all of my prior designs: the Flower, the Yin-Yang Koi Fish, the Leftover Strip Deer, and the Twenty-Four Preludes.

The last major event was the oversize folding competition. I joined up with a completely new group and helped fold a life-size corpse flower out of an eight-foot pentagon (which won the "Least Aromatic" award). In contrast to last year where I directed the folding, I tried to take a supporting role this time, mostly helping my team with the subtleties of folding giant paper as I had the most experience in that regard.

If I had a nickel for every flower I folded from a pentagon during this convention, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

But the model was fairly simple, so I decided I'd make a second one (with help from my good friend Alyssa, who also helped with the corpse flower), and here it is! This is a giant rendition of one of my own designs, titled "Gunboat Diplomacy." The image, if you don't see it right away, is a crane with its head in a cannon barrel.

I say this without a hint of exaggeration: I have never gotten as much attention for doing anything in origami as I have for this giant allegory for the Perry Expedition. People genuinely went crazy for Gunboat Diplomacy. Marc Kirschenbaum called it "one of the funniest things I've ever seen" and I might be riding that high for the rest of my life. Perhaps it helped that the 2026 convention was themed around the crane: if the crane symbolizes peace, what happens when we reveal that peace to have been constructed under the implicit threat of violence? But I'm not one to analyze my own works too much; I'll leave it to the audience to find the symbolism. It clearly made people think and that's all I ever wanted to do with origami.

And of course, all the little moments that happened are worth mentioning as well. I test-folded some of John Montroll's latest diagrams, including one stellated polyhedron of truly maddening difficulty (no spoilers, it hasn't been published yet). I purchased one of the final sheets of O-Gami paper ever made (R.I.P. The Paper Circle, 2002-2025). I met Jannie van Schuylenburg, one of the special guests for the year, who taught me a horse paperclip–and then I taught her the Dove from my Twenty-Four Preludes??? I didn't see that coming! But our aesthetics are similar in an odd way: an emphasis on straight lines and a heavy use of approximations.

Using a hidden corner in the center of the model, this actually functions as a paperclip!

There's no way to replicate the feeling of attending your first major origami convention, but attending your second has its own unique feeling that's worth appreciating. Now that I'm a familiar face to most people, I spent less time being starstruck and more time properly engaging with members of the community. I had tons of insightful conversations with John Szinger, Boice Wong, Robert Lang, and many others. I got to introduce people to the convention and to my own works for the first time. Having come back home and writing this blog post, I think I already miss it. I took the bus back from the airport and I kept doing that thing where I would look at random strangers and see the faces of people from the convention on their faces. Does anyone else do that? Surely I'm not alone in this, right?

As always, I came to the convention to learn, and indeed I learned so much by the time it was over. There's so much more that I could have done with my classes, or my display, or the oversize competition. But that's what next year is for! Once again, a huge thanks to all the organizers behind the scenes who worked tirelessly to make this event possible. Everybody who was part of this convention put in their best and made so much fun happen over these three days. (I would, of course, expect nothing less of them.) See you all soon!