The Sunday Paper #466

June 25, 2023

I’m at the first wedding of the next generation – my sister’s son just got married last night in Oklahoma City. I’m delighted that my immediate family could be together. Here we are at the rehearsal dinner.

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I had the pleasure of interviewing Sammy Lee on Paper Talk, an artist based in Denver, Colorado. Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Lee moved to Southern California at the age of sixteen. She studied fine art and media art at UCLA and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Among her many accomplishments is a performative collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma during the Bach project tour in 2018. We had a meandering conversation about her work, which appears in the form of installations and handmade books, transforming and re-contextualizing familiar items into art objects that reflect her personal history. She works with Korean hanji using three main processes: casting, wrapping and beating. 

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I enjoyed this brief blurb about Hou-Tien Cheng, the 1976 U.S. Master of Paper Cutting, who has demonstrated his dexterous art for more than 50 years in libraries, schools and museums throughout the United States, and devoted four years to conducting workshops at the American Museum of Natural History. He’s offering a program at the Ocean City Library in New Jersey on Tuesday, and he’s written a couple of books about paper cutting.

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You are invited to a FREE Zoom mini-workshop! Join me on Friday, June 30th at noon (US Mountain Time Zone) for this one-hour workshop and presentation. I’ll talk a bit about my Paper Year Membership Program, and then we’ll dive into making this Crown Lantern. Click through to register.

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This is an interesting article about Henri Matisse’s paper cut piece called The Swimming Pool, which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1975. The piece had suffered extreme damage from the acidity of the burlap it was originally mounted on (as well as exposure to light and atmospheric pollution). It took some 2000 hours to separate the paper elements from the burlap using a scalpel, rotary tool, and, in places, dismantling the burlap strand by strand by pulling on individual threads.

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Paper Tidbits

• If you’re in Denver (or wish to visit), InterOcean Studios several upcoming summer workshops, and there are several scholarships available (deadline: July 1).
• Are you thinking about fall yet? I’m teaching an online Folded Paper Forms workshop through Maine Media in September.
• If you’re thinking of coming to the Red Cliff Paper Retreat, it takes place August 21 – 25. Create paper panels in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.