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simplicity and serenity

IN THE ORIGAMI OF GIANG DINH

Photo by the artist

Dinh Truong Giang, known better as Giang Dinh (b.1966), is a Vietnamese artist living in the United States whose stylized figures of humans, animals and faces are among the most lyrical and spiritual of today’s origami art works. The spiritualism in his work is often Buddhist in inspiration, but in many of his works unidentifiable human figures are simply praying or dreaming or dancing. They could be Buddhist monks, Christian priests or Sufi mystics seeking a connection with the Divine. Although folded from paper and with a minimalist approach that renders them semi-abstract in style, Dinh’s figures, even his animals, are astonishingly expressive. Using a few well-placed folds, he is able to evoke exuberance, melancholy and even humor. In both the Zen-like simplicity of his folding style and the choice of Buddhist subjects for some of his work, we sense in his origami figures a serenity and a reverence for spiritual ideals, practices and beliefs that is rare in the often scientific and mathematical world of origami.

Born in 1966 in Hue in central Vietnam, Dinh spent his childhood in Vietnam. Although not a practicing Buddhist, he and his family do occasionally worship the Buddha in their home, and he has memories of family friends who were Buddhist monks and of visits to pagodas when he was a child in Hue. Dinh studied architecture in Vietnam and moved to the United States in 1989, where he continued his architectural studies. In 1998, he started creating origami, and for the last couple of decades he has been working as an architect, painter and origami artist. In all areas of his artistic work, he embraces simplicity and elegance. But it is in the realm of origami where Dinh is a true innovator.

Unlike most origami artists who use thin custom-made origami paper that can be folded many times, Dinh chooses to use thicker paper, such as watercolor paper, which is much harder to fold. However, once folded, this heavier paper will hold the slightest fold and allow him to model semi-abstract forms that are at once simple and highly expressive. Dinh compares the crisp, sharp folds that define many origami sculptures to drawings rendered in ink. By choosing to softly—and sometimes only partially—fold his pieces, he instead evokes the softer and more subtle lines of a pencil drawing. This thoughtful approach to folding often produces animal and human figures that are gentle and meditative, such as the figure White (2011), a simple, elegant female figure who almost appears to have been carved from marble or alabaster.

Dinh is highly admired by many in the origami community and beyond for his ability to convey the essence of a creature or person in just a few gentle folds, in the same way that a Zen ink painting can depict the essence of a monk or a monkey with just a few well-placed brush strokes. Typically, Dinh works in plain white paper in order to concentrate on the pure form and shadow of the work. Many of his works are wet folded, a technique developed in the mid-twentieth century that involves moistening the paper slightly in order to smooth down points and angles and create more naturalistic, sculptural forms. Whereas many origami artists tend to fold animals, abstract forms and geometric patterns, Giang Dinh has excelled in creating human figures engaged in dancing, praying or even taking flight as they transform into angels. All of his works—his animals, humans and deities—radiate a warm and gentle spirit that he seems to have released from the paper through the act of folding. His bears, in particular his lonely looking Polar Bear (2011), evoke a great empathy in the viewer for a majestic beast whose existence is threatened by human activity.

Bukan and Tiger

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA 2007, handmade paper (Photo by the artist)

Dreamer

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA Designed 2010, folded 2014, watercolor paper (Photo by the artist)

White

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA 2011, watercolor paper (Photo by the artist)

Fly

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA 2010, watercolor paper (Photo by the artist)

To describe his artistic process, Dinh has quoted Antoine de Saint Exupéry, who wrote, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” This perfection through simplicity is exquisitely apparent in his work Prayer (2010), in which he employs a few simple folds to create the image of a robed figure praying, the most tightly folded element of the form being the hands clasped in prayer. “You can say that the simplicity aspect of my work is inspired by Zen’s art and philosophy. I love Haiku,” admits Dinh. However, he also points out other artistic influences. “I love the works of Brancusi, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi....” In another work, Dreamer (designed 2010, folded 2014), a semi-abstracted figure is seated in the lotus position, apparently in meditation, his whole form merging with the ground on which he sits.

Dance

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/ USA 2009, watercolor paper (Photo by the artist)

Buddha

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA 2010, watercolor paper (Photo by the artist)

Bear

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA 2012, bronze (Photo by the artist)

Solitude

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA 2014, watercolor paper (Photo by the artist)

Some of Dinh’s most captivating works are those in which a series of figures seemingly evolve from separate sheets of paper. In his series of Dancers and Dreamers, each of the elements is slightly more folded than the previous one, giving the viewer a sense of his artistic process as he gradually dampens and models the watercolor paper to give the figures three-dimensional form. In I Want to Fly (2005), which he created for the landmark origami exhibition Masters of Origami at the Hangar-7 Gallery in Salzburg, Austria, in 2005, his figures not only evolve from the paper sheet. They grow wings and take flight as angels. In the wittiest of these series, Fly (2010), Dinh depicts a legendary Japanese wizard-like character, Abe no Seimei, who folds a paper bird and then uses his magical powers to transform it into a real bird, which then flies away. Japan’s most celebrated artist, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), captured the scene in one of his popular Manga painting manuals, in which he depicted sheets of folded paper transforming magically into egrets. It was this image that inspired Dinh to create the whole scene as an origami sculpture. In Dinh’s masterpiece of origami engineering, the squares of paper are connected at the corners and are hung from the ceiling. As the work moves with the air, the bird genuinely seems to take flight.

Among his human figures, legendary Buddhist characters are well represented. Perhaps the most iconic of Dinh’s images is his Buddha (2010), folded from cream-colored watercolor paper in the form of the head of the Buddha, recognizable by his ushnisha, or cranial protuberance, and his elongated earlobes, but created without any facial details. This powerful, faceless image reminds us of the Zen Buddhist rejection of icons in favor of focusing on the actual teachings of the Buddha. Dinh left the head faceless in the hope that everyone will see their own face in empty surface and see the Buddha in themselves. “We must always remind ourselves,” he explains, “of the good nature and innocence that we were born with.” His figure of Bodhidharma (2004), the patriarch of meditational Zen Buddhism, is almost as mysterious, a tall form that is mostly hood, with a rugged face peering out from a single opening. Through precise folding, Dinh succeeds in conveying the sullen expression—complete with bulging eyes—that is often portrayed in Zen paintings of this legendary teacher.

Dancers

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA 2003, watercolor paper (Photo by the artist)

In another Buddhist figure, Bukan and Tiger (2007), Dinh depicts the Chinese Chan/Zen Master Feng Gan seated on a mat accompanied by his pet tiger. Executed with a few simple folds in humble brown paper, the sculpture possesses the tenderness and humor that is typical of Zen portraiture in other media, including the ink paintings on which this piece was modeled. The sensitivity of his delicate folding here exemplifies Dinh’s brilliance as an origami artist and his deep affinity for the spiritual nature of the subject he is depicting. “I do read about Buddhism and Zen, and feel very close to Buddhism’s principal teaching,” explains Dinh. “I can imagine myself to be a Buddhist monk.”

Bodhidharma (detail)

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA 2004, watercolor paper (Photo by the artist)

Mother and Child

Giang Dinh, Vietnam/USA 2005, watercolor paper (Photo by the artist)