Batterway: Paper Art

Paper Art

Origami artist Ekkasit Khemnguad explains that the craft has a range of applications, from recreational and educational to commercial and industrial

Published: 16/05/2010 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: Brunch

After showing off a complete origami crane, Ekkasit Khemnguad unfolds the paper and creates a rabbit out of the same piece of paper. Then unfolding the rabbit, he pauses and stares at the paper again, thinking of the next figure to create. "We work like an architect in a way," says Ekkasit, who calls himself an origami artist and leads the Thai Origami Club.

TALENTED: Origami artist Ekkasit Khemnguad and a collection of his favourite dinosaurs. PHOTOS: YINGYONG UN-ANONGRAK

To create an origami piece, the technique varies from one artist to another. Some sketch the numerous lines on the paper before starting to fold it. "But I sketch my work with numerous creases, not drawings."

Looking at a square piece of paper, a veteran origami artist can easily turn it into the desired shape by calculating the space at each corner of the paper for different parts and limbs of the figure, be it a dragonfly, a dinosaur or a lady with a violin.

But for an easy figure like a fish, Ekkasit simply imagines a fish and calculates the space of the paper - all in his mind. It's a matter of experience. A few minutes later, the same piece of paper that was once a crane and a rabbit has now been transformed into a fish.

As a five-year-old boy whose family couldn't afford expensive toys, Ekkasit was taught to play with pieces of paper and his imagination, and he once submitted a dinosaur in art class instead of a simple crane like the others. The 28-year-old postgraduate student has been a part-time origami workshop instructor since high school. His mother works at The Japan Foundation, allowing him perfect access to origami.

However, professional origami isn't widely recognised. Unlike in Japan or several Western countries where origami counts as a real profession, "the art is still considered a toy in Thai society", says Ekkasit, who now earns a fair amount from being a workshop instructor and building commercial solutions for advertising agencies.

The term origami - from ori meaning folding and kami meaning paper - may sound unfamiliar to a lot of Thais. "We've been folding banana leaves," points out Ekkasit. The paper bags used by street sellers are a type of origami.

Although Ekkasit can't think of how origami can be applied at the industrial level for Thailand, it has been widely applied to many industries worldwide. Origami is not only a part of packaging design, it is also largely used as a model, showing how a tool works in aerospace and medical experiments while the creases show what a piece of fabric might become.

In a simpler version, the art can easily become an affordable educational tool. Without mathematics, different folds tell different degrees of angles. Different steps of folding allow practitioners to learn about logic; a complete figurine is only a result of all steps from beginning to end combined, despite the fact that all steps do not need to be done in chronological order. Switching the order, however, is only for advanced practitioners.

A novice starts from a simple model with the fewest limbs and parts. Like novice musicians playing other people's compositions by decoding those notes, Ekkasit explains origami beginners decode the complicated creases of figures created by professional artists. "The ultimate goal is to create your own compositions."

In a recent advertising piece for a bank in which Ekkasit made a fish out of a dollar note, he had to readjust the folding process. His experience taught him how to transform the rectangular banknote into a fish. An origami figure is only a result of one piece of paper without cutting or gluing.

New origami is usually an improvisational process during work. The late Akira Yoshizawa pioneered several techniques including popular wet-folding and making thick pieces of paper look softer; while advanced origami master Satoshi Kamiya invented a rope action technique to make the physical joints of his figurines look real, round and moveable.

Ekkasit recently created his own version of Hanuman and Ganesh, which had never been created by any artist before. Apart from a collection of his favourite dinosaurs with different gestures, the origami artist plans to create another collection of characters from Thai literature like the Ramakien, the Thai version of the Ramayana epic. "I want to create something unique and Thai."