Folding In Love with Kuniko Yamamoto

By Phil Lederer

Tucked away up a crunchy little drive and under the warm dappled shade of a great tree, Kuniko Yamamoto’s OrigamiAir Art Studio crouches like a contented little cottage.

Inside, the walls are full of Yamamoto’s creations—origami animals, multi-colored geometric displays, scarlet red demons, whimsical designs and even a stylish dress with a corseted waist made entirely of folded paper—and near every surface is covered with some sort of project, frozen in some state of completion.

And in the corner, Yamamoto is throwing paper airplanes. Perhaps one of the most common forms of casual origami, Yamamoto has come to the world of paper-based avionics late in her explorations—but taken to it with unbridled enthusiasm. She dumps a veritable fleet onto one of her many workstations, each little aircraft its own fragile design, and selects them one at a time and launches them into the air. Most crash mere moments after departure, but she doesn’t seem to care. And whatever shortcomings she may have as an FAA inspector, she more than makes up for in love for the craft.

She stops.

“It’s not that I fell in love with this art form,” she says.

No. Clearly not.

For Yamamoto, as a young girl growing up in Japan, origami was simply part of life. There was never so much an active choice to engage the art form as opposed to the fact that she just didn’t know of a world without it. Her mother introduced her to origami when she was only five. Her aunts and uncles showed her new tricks when they visited. And when Yamamoto played with her friends, they would all be folding paper. “It was everywhere,” she says. “An everyday thing.”

And it wasn’t really framed as an art form, so much as a fun activity or, eventually, a sort of manifestation of a set of principles emphasizing precision, minimalism and invention, while never losing sight of the importance of aesthetic beauty. “The spirit of origami,” Yamamoto says, permeated all, from the architecture of everyday life to the minor niceties of social interaction. “If you saw Japanese gift-wrapping,” she says, “you would be amazed.”

Still, a young Yamamoto had very different dreams and at age 23 left Japan for the United States with visions of the stage.

“I fell in love with theater,” she says, and she dreamed of creating her own solo show. Performing in a blackbox theater or in a big auditorium, she didn’t really care. Any audience would do, as long as she was on the stage.

Japanese folktales became the foundation of her shows, leaning on the stories of her childhood and acting them out with masks and miming. By nature of the stories themselves, she gravitated towards younger American audiences, exposing them to the colors and customs of Japanese storytelling in a pre-internet era.

But as anyone with children can attest, they can be a fickle audience—and brutally honest. It wasn’t long before Yamamoto realized that her act needed a little something to spice it up and hold their attention. Something visual. Something dynamic. Something borderline magical.

The answer came in the form of a memory, seemingly unbidden. And the next time Yamamoto took the stage to tell her stories, she brought some paper with her and folded shapes alongside. A whale, a boat, a fish, or a butterfly—the stories came to life in her hands, given form through some gentle magic that summoned shapes from the boring flat plane of the paper.

The audience was mesmerized.

“You could see their eyes go wide open and their bodies go forward,” Yamamoto says. “They were captivated.”

And in a way, so was Yamamoto.

In the years that Yamamoto was away, pursuing her dreams of the stage and building her show, the world of origami flourished, growing by leaps and bounds. She remembered the basic valley folds and mountain folds, the squash folds and the pleats and the sinks, but no art form survives by remaining stagnant and origami is no exception.

Unit Origami, or modular origami, the art of creating forms using more than a single piece of paper, opened new doors and could soon be found in mathematics departments worldwide, as massive molecular polygons and class projects. The 2000s saw an explosion in tessellation in origami, the hypnotic, digital aesthetic riding the internet wave to form a tsunami that flooded servers in all directions.

And the impact was felt beyond the arts world. The most efficient airbags were designed and folded using principles from origami. Solar arrays and sails were devised to unfold from compact packages into mammoth planes as gently as tissue paper. Stents to prop up arteries utilized the same ideas.

“The genius of origami,” Yamamoto says, “was everywhere.”

And Yamamoto spent each night exploring the latest creations and innovations, the coolest new designs and the next challenge. She made dinosaurs, like a tyrannosaurus rex with puny little arms, nubby little eyes and fearsome teeth. She made spiraled flowers out of wire mesh. She made a clunky scarab beetle with six long and separate legs and felt a sense of pride that harkened back to simpler times.

“The momentum of rediscovery kept me going,” she says. “And gradually, I fell in love with it, that you could create something with so much depth.”

She pauses, then clarifies.

“I fell in love with the effect of origami, not the paper-folding itself.”

And it’s this effect that Yamamoto tries to spread through her OrigamiAir art sessions and origami workshops, seeing the artist bring her stories and her tools into classrooms and libraries, art centers and exhibition halls, inviting her audiences to try their hand at the craft.

With her latest series of workshops, Ocean Life, Yamamoto unveiled a new collection of original forms, from hungry sharks and fishing boats to colossal squid and sea turtles. At each workshop, attendees learn basic folding techniques and how to make one or two forms. “And you can jump right into it,” she says. “You don’t have to know anything about folding.”

Kids, she says, are exceptionally good at this.

Whereas adult audiences express trepidation at the mere idea of attempting something as precise and delicate as origami, wringing their hands at the thought of making a mistake, younger crowds can’t wait to give it a shot.

“When kids see how much you can do with a piece of paper,” Yamamoto says, “they just want to do it.”

And they remind her of why she loves origami.

“It’s a journey of the imagination all the way from beginning to end,” she says.

“And even paper can surprise you.”