One Thousand Origami Cranes, 2021.
According to East Asian legends, anyone who folds one thousand origami cranes will be granted eternal happiness. This past year has been an incredibly difficult time due to the pandemic. Since the beginning of last March, I began folding origami cranes to keep myself occupied. After having stopped at around ~600 cranes, I resumed folding my 1000th paper crane as part of a timeline project. I have chosen to stick to the theme of good fortune as I ended up gifting my parents my jar of 1000 cranes for good luck, as per East Asian tradition. I want to display with this project that happiness can be gifted to one another, and show that one can move on from difficult pasts by occupying oneself with a happy hobby. While this took hours and days to complete, the sense of accomplishment of being able to spread hope through a simple origami project has given me a new sense of liveliness. Ultimately, this project gave me a chance to understand the past tradition of tributary gifts and its reflection in the arts, and for me to spread joy and happiness to both myself and my parents.