Vancouver man evolves as a celebrity in world of origami
Joseph Wu has been folding paper since he was three years old.
That’s a lot of paper cranes. And rabbits and dragons and frogs and roosters and swans and cellular phones and Volkswagen Beetles.
Wu, who played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons as a kid and was trained as a scientist, is parlaying his early childhood fascination with origami into a successful career as an artist and commercial illustrator. He takes a sculptor’s approach to paper folding, pressing hard on the technical limits of what this ancient Japanese craft can accomplish, and the intellectual freight it can be made to carry.
His innovations have earned him international recognition and a steady income from clients such as Volkswagen, Intel, the Nagano Olympics, Stolichnaya Vodka and many other recognized brands.
He has become a celebrity in the world of origami, with one of the Internet’s most-visited origami sites (www.origami.as). His commitment to origami as an art form won him a commission to create an origami-themed play for the spring of 2008, tentatively entitled The Life of Paper. Increasingly, he has to rattle a legal sabre at commercial imitators attempting to pass off his designs as their own.
