TOMOKO FUSE: A MODERN MASTER
It is a truism of almost every field that experts have their specialty. This is especially so in the art world. We associate the greats with a particular style and genre: Rodin with bronze figurate sculpture, Calder with the mobile, Picasso with cubism. The days of the generalist—think Leonardo da Vinci, moving between painting, fresco, sculpture, and invention—seem long past. The only way to be successful, it seems, is to find one’s unique but narrow niche, that special vein of gold, then mine it artistically and assiduously.
Tomoko Fuse, though, is an artist in the da Vinci mold, moving among multiple origami genres and taking each, in turn, to new heights, before moving on to the next. If you asked an origami aficionado a few years ago about Fuse, they would rave about her modular work. Unit Origami, now almost thirty years old, is the classic reference in the field. Its combination of enjoyable folding sequences, ingenious locks, and stunningly beautiful finished forms set the standard for modular origami for years to come and established Fuse as the modern master of modulars, the standard bearer of the genre.
As she continued through the following years to dip into her apparently boundless well of modular designs (which she regularly shared in her columns in Origami Tanteidan Magazine), it would have been natural for her to stay in the modular lane. But a single genre was not for her. Instead, she added to her portfolio the vast field of single-sheet geometric origami: tessellations, corrugations, pleated forms, and more. Her landmark book, Spiral: Origami / Art / Design, brought the same combination of enjoyable sequence, clever design, and gorgeous finished form to single-sheet geometric folding, and once again established Tomoko Fuse at the top of an entirely new genre.
And the present work continues her artistic evolution, again exploring single-sheet folded forms, but now using pleated forms as the unifying feature of the genre.
The field of origami tessellations has roots in both the Japanese origami art by such masters as Fujimoto and Momotani, as well as Western folded paper forms, including works from the German Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and explorers of the 1960s like Ron Resch. From the mid-1990s onward, the field has grown explosively, with origami artists around the world producing a vast range of geometric forms. Even among these, though, Fuse’s work stands out. There is a grace, an elegance, and, most of all, a richness of texture that is nearly overwhelming. Her folded forms are intensely detailed, with hundreds, if not thousands, of interlocking folds. But these are not simply massive repetition. There are patterns and motifs on multiple scales, so that as one focuses inward or zooms outward, there is a new story at each level of viewing. The work is always fresh and there is something new to discover and perceive, whether on first viewing or fiftieth.
One of the characteristics of many origami tessellations—and here I use the term “tessellations” broadly, to take in any geometric folding containing repeated motifs—is exposure of the paper. A large fraction of the paper surface is visible in the finished work. This is to be contrasted with the most complex origami representational work, in which layers are tightly packed and stacked, so that only a tiny fraction of the paper surface is visible in the finished work. In many tessellations, and in many of Fuse’s tessellations, in particular, we can see most of the paper. Fuse takes full advantage of this, using papers with delicate textures and often graded coloration across the sheet. The interplay between the color gradation and the patterns of folds brings a new depth to the folded work.
There is yet another form of exposure in her artwork. Many of the pieces are shown twice, with front and back lighting, the latter illuminating the now translucent works. In her backlit work, we now see even more of the paper—filtered and transformed by the foreground layers, but now revealing hidden structure and patterns so rich that it is sometimes difficult to believe that both forms arise from the same pattern of folds.
A single chapter of this book could well serve as a life’s work for an artist, but Fuse has moved across genres her entire life and the five chapters here display both variety and evolution. Here we see the next iteration of her landmark explorations of unit folding. Now, though, the units are strips. They cross, knot, and re-cross, creating patterns that hearken back to the world of modulars, but also look forward to the tilings and tessellations of the next four chapters. Through the next three chapters, she explores and expands this world, and in the final chapter takes the folding to a natural crescendo by bringing light fully into the art. Light is not just a part of the staging, it, like the paper, is now a full-fledged partner in the presentation. Fuse weaves together folds, fibers, and photons. The result is magical, and will leave the reader gasping in astonishment at its beauty and, perhaps, inspired to follow their own muse into this wondrous art.
Dr. Robert J. Lang
PAPER GARDEN
BY INFINITE FOLDING
European House of Art Upper Bavaria Schafhof, Friesing, Germany, 2015