1000 Cranes Community Art Project

One of my favourite hobbies is creating origami. The art of turning a very simple flat piece of paper into different 2D or even 3D shapes that represent something familiar to our daily lives is truly amazing, even magical. Yet, origami can be simple enough that allow people of all ages to create something fun and beautiful with their bare hands.

Late last year, while during lockdown, I found some very old and small origami paper that I had and started folding one of the most common origami creatures, CRANES.

Being Asian, since a young child, I already knew how cranes symbolize blessings and longevity in the Japanese culture. And one of the most famous tradition is that, people believed folding 1,000 paper cranes will make a wish come true. Therefore, sometimes, when someone becomes severely ill, their family and friends would come together and fold 1,000 cranes, in the hopes that their loved one will recover and become healthy once again.

This is how I got the idea to create a project of folding 1,000 cranes. As I started folding the tiny cranes, I wanted to come up with a unique idea to display them instead of simply stringing them together. I just thought how wonderful they would look if positioned neatly side by side, then suddenly decided that the best way is to place them onto a giant crane. As I had created a couple of giant origami pieces before, this wasn't an entirely new idea to me, but decorating one with much smaller origami was such an exciting idea!

Nearly 200 tiny cranes laying on a big red crane actually created the visual effect of feathers of the wings. In a way, it's reflecting what this pandemic is teaching us, each of us are unique and complete in our own ways, but collectively we make up the society, country, humanity and even the universe. Thus, we must all be willing to work together while respecting each other in order to build something strong and beautiful. A bird cannot fly without its strong healthy wings made up of hundreds of feathers.

So, the final piece of the first phase of this project contained 222 cranes. I wanted to dedicate it to humanity as we are experiencing a global pandemic that requires much unity, trust, faith and love. My wish is for us to find the peace within and get through this global pandemic by becoming better versions of ourselves for ourselves and for each other. And of course, also bringing some love, comfort and showing support to those affected by this disease, their loved ones, and most importantly, our frontline workers. The dedication that frontline workers have shown to keep our communities safe and functioning cannot be simply expressed by words. We are so blessed to have so many amazing people working tirelessly on many levels to help us recover from this pandemic so we can build stronger and more heart-connected societies.

This is also why it was important to turn this project into a community artwork. I wanted to be able to connect people to demonstrate how we can still be united while being physically apart. Also, folding 1,000 cranes together as a community represents how we wish to bring blessings to humanity and for us to heal from this pandemic.

For some of the cranes, they were actually made using newspaper with Covid19 related stories, and also grocery flyers, as this pandemic made us realized the importance of the simple activities and people (even “strangers”) in our daily lives. Although we were forced to experience many unprecedented difficulties and challenges, this worldwide event also forced us to slow down, shift our perspectives and lifestyles. This gave us a chance to reflect and make changes to our lives that many of us were afraid to or had too many excuses for before.

Personally, this project actually gave me purpose and helped me focus in a time of despair and sadness as I had only started recovering from years of depression and anxiety and began switching to a more art based career a couple years ago. Thus, much of the steps and efforts that I had put into for creating a new career during a period when I was re-starting my life just suddenly became obsolete due to this pandemic.

But by being able to set a goal of collecting 1,000 cranes, I started reaching out to different non-profit organizations to setup online workshops, demonstrating how to fold paper cranes, and request participants to email me photos of their cranes so I could create a Thank You video for our frontline workers. Although, this process wasn’t always easy, it still gave me hope and motivation and to keep trying when things didn’t go as expected.

Since this project has a personal and community component, I received joy from both working by myself and with others as well. On my own, folding the cranes helped me have something meaningful to focus on, as well as calming down and kept myself motivated when discouraged. Sometimes, just seeing how pretty the colourful cranes looked individually and collectively as they were completed bought joy and hope to myself.

Also, because there were a few months where I couldn’t find any participants to join the project, I folded another 100+ cranes to keep it going. Which meant that I had to find a new way to display these cranes. I wanted the big red crane to be the focal point, so for these new cranes, I had to come up with a creative way to incorporate them together. Thus, deciding how to display my cranes was actually a very fun, inspiring and creative process that I loved. First, I decided to use over 20 cranes to create a ring shape to represent unity. But with the other 100+ cranes, stringing them one by one would create too many strands, making them harder to display. As I was playing with them, I decided to glue a few of the cranes together to create some pieces that looked like flowers. This not only saved some space (vertically), but they looked so much prettier placed together! And each of these floral shaped crane pieces reminds me of small groups of people in the community, such as families and organizations, which adds a deeper meaning to this art installation.

The second part of joy for this project came from being able to show people how to create paper cranes. From showing participants how to fold a crane step by step, seeing their struggles and trying to explain the steps more clearly to them virtually, to finally seeing them complete a crane of their own is an amazing experience! Their joy, excitement and satisfaction is contagious, and support truly warms my heart! I also noticed how each person’s crane looked somewhat different as some decided to curl the wings, some had extremely sharp edges, while others have a much more straight neck and tail! Even though all the steps in folding a crane is exactly the same, people were able to add in a special “signature” to their origami pieces. All in all, I’m just very grateful to be able to bring so many different groups and individuals together to complete this wonderful project during a time of difficulties.

For this particular project, although scissors is not required for folding a crane. It was essential for me and other participants to cut different paper, such as bristle board, newspaper, old calendar paper, grocery flyers, and even vaccine information flyers into squares of various sizes to create some of the cranes. You must have a nice piece of square paper in order to create a perfect crane! And the sound of cutting paper, along with the feeling of a pair of scissors cutting paper and fabric of different thickness and texture has always been a therapeutic feeling to me. And I love how many people were able to reuse scrap paper to create very unique cranes that stood out with character!

Currently, we have close to 800 cranes and I’m still in the final stages of gathering 1,000 cranes. My goal is to be able to collect the cranes and complete a Thank You video to our frontline workers by mid-July. However, I had already started setup an art display with the cranes that I’ve folded and photos that I have received from participants. I will be adding onto this structure as I more pictures are sent to me.

Lastly, there are plans to display this art piece in public location(s) when indoor activities are allowed to resume where I live (Ontario, Canada). This will not only show our appreciation to our frontline workers, but also act as a reminder of what we had experienced during this global pandemic, whether negative or positive. Hopefully, people will understand that what’s important is actually what we choose to learn from any experience and the growth that has happened within each of us.

I’m truly thankful for this art project and all the different people that has helped me organize workshops with many different groups of people in our community for contributing their time to show support in what I believe in.