Yes, we’re all trying to outdo each other, but we’re also “giving away the store,” so to speak, by showing each other how our latest invention is constructed (primarily through crease patterns. It is a pleasant and remarkable situation, this mixture of sharing and competition that has remained nicely balanced for many years. Next year, someone brings a winged spotted beetle! And so it goes. Did he bring a beetle last year? This year, I’ll bring a winged beetle.
At subsequent conventions, everyone tried to top what they’d seen the year before. At each meeting or convention, artists brought and showed their latest creations. This spirit was most evident during the fabled “Bug Wars” of the 1990s, when several members of the Origami Tanteidan (and the occasional Western interloper, such as myself) sought to regularly one-up each other with respect to the complexity, realism, and life, of our respective arthropod designs. This spirit of sharing has led to phenomenal advances in the state of the art over the last 40 years as artists willingly share both concepts and techniques.īut of course, mixed in with the spirit of selfless sharing is a healthy dose of friendly competition. Origami, unlike many other fields, is remarkably collegial, and the vast majority of the world’s origami composers readily share their ideas with one another.
I should mention that this is not at all unusual.