Playful, intricate Japanese leaf art – in pictures – Art and design

Phenomenally good!

Love that the artist leveraged the existing [extant] structure of the leaf to build the end results.

There are some beautiful lessons about design and

leaning in to what-is-already-there while going for the outcomes you want.

This qualifies as one of those "make relatively mundane thing more exotic and interesting to Western audiences by slapping Japanese in front of it" posts, even though this is all done by a single individual artist who just happens to be Japanese, and not a particularly Japanese tradition.

These were superb. So Japanese.

I know paper-cuts are historically a Chinese tradition, so I would assume that the Japanese borrowed it along with everything else they got.

(And apparently so: [1] says that traditional papercutting is called "kirigami" and they got it from China via a Korean monk around 600)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papercutting