Taiwan Today

Su Chuo-ying shares the fun and creativity of origami.

Rather than viewing paper as just a medium for writing, printing, drawing or packaging, origami artist Su Chuo-ying (蘇卓英) looks at an individual sheet and sees the potential form of a rose, a rabbit, a mushroom and almost anything else. “One square, no cutting, no glue,” she says. “There are unlimited possibilities and infinite fun.”

Born in 1956 in Taipei City, Su’s childhood was typical of the time in that her parents spent most of their income on food and daily necessities, and children had to make their own toys from whatever was available. Used paper was one of the things available, and folding a piece of paper into a boat or plane and racing it against those made by other children was a common game. While most of the children tried to make their creations go faster by shouting “Go, go, go” during a race, the young Su realized that how far a paper boat sailed or how high a paper plane flew had more to do with how it was folded than how much “spiritual support” it received from the cheering crowd. She would spend time trying different ways of folding her boats and planes, making improvements and, eventually, winning races.

Although she did not study origami formally as she grew up, Su made a hobby of paper folding and tried to find ways to apply it in her daily life. When she worked as a nurse at Zhudong Veterans Hospital in Hsinchu County, northern Taiwan, Su would fold the individually wrapped doses of medicine into little things like cranes for her patients. Later, when she helped  manage a movie theater belonging to her husband’s family, Su rolled the used movie posters into strips and wove them into baskets. It was also her hobby to “crack” origami works created by other artists. “Instead of looking at the author’s step-by-step diagrams, I once spent three months re-creating a flower bouquet similar to one I saw in an origami book,” she recalls. “It turned out that a large part of our folding sequences were the same, but it would have taken away all the fun had I just followed the same steps and done something identical.”

In 2005, Su’s husband, Ke Kuan-yu (柯寬裕), decided to close the movie theater business and Su gained all the free time she needed to work on origami. Actually, Su has tried several different crafts over the years including knitting, embroidery and bamboo weaving, but decided to focus on paper folding after her retirement. The key reason, she says, is the portability of paper. “My husband and I like to travel,” Su says. “We don’t want to carry a bunch of bamboo strips during our trips.” And the deeper she dug into origami the more fascinated she became with the craft. “She folds on the plane, in the car, when we’re chatting and even at the hair salon when the hairdresser is rinsing out the shampoo,” Ke says. “She treats it as a full-time job and works at least seven hours a day, six days a week on it.”

Su notes that it is generally accepted by origami enthusiasts that Japan, where folded-paper icons and other paper creations have even been incorporated into certain religious ceremonies, is the country with the most extensive tradition. Even the name commonly used for paper folding, origami, is derived from two Japanese root words: ori, meaning “fold” and kami, which means “paper.” There is evidence of paper-folding traditions in many other places including mainland China, where objects like paper lotus have long been burnt at funerals. Paper folding has never been regarded as an art form in Chinese culture on par with painting or sculpture, however, so the tradition was neither preserved nor promoted to any great degree. There are few Chinese paper-folding artists and only a handful of Chinese-language books on basic origami have been published. As a result, in the past, local enthusiasts were left to develop their skill largely through a process of trial and error.

Thanks to the popularity of the Internet, Su’s research into origami has become easier in recent years. Various websites, for example, allow access to images of works created by origami masters from all over the world. What is more helpful is that since many sites post photos of how to create an origami work, Su has been able to advance her technique considerably despite language barriers.

In fact, paper-folding techniques have seen marked advancement on the whole. The application of mathematics and logic—both closely related to origami—means that enthusiasts can avoid a lot of the experimentation that was necessary before such a scientific approach was adopted, and go on to create much more complicated models.

Complex Creases

Technical origami has developed alongside the mathematical approach to paper folding. In technical origami, instead of folding a sheet of paper step by step, the practitioner “fashions the paper into a rough shape, observes the creases and goes from there,” Su says. The crease pattern forms the basic layout of a desired design. Observing such patterns allows artists to plot future designs on paper before any actual folding occurs. The development of this way of working has also allowed for the creation of extremely complex and detailed pieces.

This process of finding the crease lines by roughly shaping the paper, of course, does not always work. When faced with a bottleneck, Su usually clips the half-finished work to her living room curtain, leaves it there for a while and then goes back to it at a later time. “Sometimes you get to complete what you’d wanted to do, sometimes you come up with something totally different, and other times you admit failure, throw it into trash can and start anew,” Su says. “Knowing the technique doesn’t guarantee the result, and that’s the fun of it.”

There is also a wet-folding technique in which the paper is dampened to produce shapes with gentle curves, and modular origami, which forms a complete design by putting together a number of similar pieces. The basic module is usually easy to fold, and several modular origami designs have been seen in Taiwan for a long time. Many people, for example, like to display a paper pineapple formed of triangle-shaped modules at home, as the words for “pineapple” and “fortune comes” sound similar in Taiwanese. As Su sees it, though, there are many other designs waiting to be developed from countless other modules.

Another technique Su likes is origami tessellations—tessellated designs made from a single sheet of paper. The technique starts by folding a piece of paper numerous times and then forming the desired pattern by pulling or squeezing the creases. In theory, each tessellated design could be described by a mathematical formula. Su does not have any idea about such formulas, but she knows that tessellated origami is a very time-consuming technique, saying that a piece might take a week or more to complete.

In most of her works, Su follows the origami convention of using only square paper. Money origami is an exception. Folding paper-money has become especially popular in the United States, where it is referred to as dollar bill origami. Su had seen a number of such works online, but did not pay much attention to them until a couple of years ago, when she was playing a dice game that is popular during the Lunar New Year holiday. “I wasn’t really interested in the game, so I was kind of playing with a hundred-dollar bill [about US$3] and it was fun,” she says. Last year—the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese zodiac—she gave rabbits made of money as a New Year gift to friends, and this year she created a money dragon for the Year of the Dragon. Su’s rabbit and dragon designs are on display at Academia Historica, the national archive office, as part of its collection of the Republic of China’s currency.

Paper Love

In fact, many of Su’s designs are inspired by festivals. Come Lunar New Year, she creates red envelopes—a traditional way to give a gift of money on important occasions—decorated with that year’s zodiac symbol. Origami roses are for Valentine’s Day, and a folded-paper cake is a must for a family member’s birthday. There are also more commonplace items such as lamp shades and plates, as well as ornamental plants, animals and figurines made of paper. Of them all, roses are perhaps Su’s most popular designs. To date, she has created dozens of different roses and has received several requests from young men who wanted to purchase paper roses to win a girl’s heart. “I don’t sell any of my works, but I can teach them how the roses are folded,” Su says. She asks to see a photo of the girl if the two young people end up as a couple. How successful are the  paper roses? “I’ve already seen several photos,” she says.

Most people learn about Su’s origami from her website, Eagle’s Blog, which was initially set up in 2006 to share news with her son and daughter who were studying abroad. Su started to add photos of her works to the blog in 2007 and before long, it became one of the most popular origami websites in Taiwan. One of the reasons for the popularity is perhaps that, while most artists only share images of their creations, Su gives the step-by-step process behind her work. Since 2007, she has already shared nearly 200 origami designs this way. Her blog was selected as one of the finalists in the 2009 Global Chinese Blog Award and received the competition’s Special Jury Award in 2011. The awards have been hosted by the Taipei-based China Times newspaper since 2005 and are strongly contested, with thousands of entries each year. Though in Chinese, Su’s blog has been visited by enthusiasts worldwide, and she considers the discussion and even criticism it inspires as one of the key factors that helps her progress.

In addition to sharing her works and techniques online, Su has been invited by schools, companies and charity organizations to teach origami. Whether online or in a classroom, Su always tells origami students that patience, as well as practice, are the two things that make origami work. “Your first rose may look like a cabbage,” she says. “Practice 10 times, and you’ll get your rose.”

In January this year, Su published her first book Festival Origami, which covers step-by-step instructions of some 20 origami works. The book sold out and was reprinted within three months. “In my job, I deal with the weight, thickness, color and other physical features of paper,” writes Huang Xiang-feng (黃祥峰), a manager at Yuen Foong Paper Co., the firm that supplies Su with the paper she uses, in the preface of her book. “Su’s works have shown me that it’s not the paper itself, but what paper can bring to people’s life that really matters.” To origami master Su, what paper can bring is infinite fun and the happiness of sharing.

Write to Jim Hwang at cyhuang03@mofa.gov.tw