Masayo Fukuda is a Japanese artist who specializes in kirie or kirigami — breathtaking artwork created by intricately cutting a design into a single piece of paper.
Below is a video displaying some of her artwork (h/t Elizabeth).
The creativity of artists like Fukuda reminds me of what Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), one of my favorite novelists, wrote:
This is man: For the most part a foul, wretched, abominable creature, a packet of decay…a hater of his kind, a cheater, a scorner, a mocker, a reviler, a thing that kills and murders in a mob or in the dark, loud and full of brag surrounded by his fellows, but without the courage of a rat alone…. This is man, who will…bow down in worship before charlatans, and let his poets die…. Yes, this is man, and it is impossible to say the worst of him, for the record of his obscene existence, his baseness, lust, cruelty, and treachery, is illimitable….
Yet if the gods could come here to a desolate, deserted earth where only the ruin of man’s cities remained…a cry would burst out of their hearts…. Behold his works:
He needed songs to sing in battle, and he had Homer! He needed words to curse his enemies, and he had Dante, he had Voltaire, he had Swift! He needed cloth to cover up his hairless, puny flesh against the seasons, and he wove the robes of Solomon…. He needed a temple to propitiate his God, and he made Chartres and Fountains Abbey!….
So this is man, the worst and best of him.
~E