The Japanese three-dimensional paper-cut artist “SouMa” can create a “one paper, one world” paper-cut work with just a piece of white paper, which is amazing.
SouMa was born in Shimane Prefecture in western Japan and still has roots there. She has been exposed to paper cutting since she was six years old, just like drawing. Having loved paper cutting so much, and enjoying creating it, burning it, falling in love with this moment once more and once more, but it wasn’t until a few years ago, when people outside her family saw her work, that her status as an artist was born.
SouMa has never been to art or design school, nor studied with a paper-cut teacher, but is a self-taught paper-cut artist who has developed unique and novel styles and techniques through numerous failures and experiments. She leaves everything to her own sense to create, so her works have original stylistic characteristics, which are not only two-dimensional, but also three-dimensional, and integrate with light and shadow.
Since regarding 2012, she has attracted a lot of attention through television appearances, articles in newspapers, and exhibitions of her work at department stores such as Takashimaya and Matsue Castle. In 2014, he was appointed as the tourism ambassador of Matsue City, Shimane Prefecture, and won the grand prize for his work “Agitate” at the first “All Japan Art Public Exhibition”.
Last year, SouMa created a series of works themed around “water” and “light” that are incredibly realistic.
In the work, SouMa expresses “water” and “light” in a special way, devising a way to pinpoint the areas where she wants the light to appear brighter by creating subtle brightness differences in the same white areas.
SouMa uses a paper cutter to cut out flat white paper and paste it on a black background. Depending on how the cutter is used, the cutting line can be scraped away very thinly. The gray areas that look like shadows are made by cutting the paper as thin as possible so that the black background paper can be seen through the shadows. The gradient effect is expressed in several stages of adjustment, making it appear three-dimensional. The thickness of the creative paper is as thin as copy paper on the market, but she thins it like a sculpture to create the effect of feeling the thickness of the paper.
The work consists of two parts, “Plastic Bottle with Water” and “Plastic Bottle Floating on the River”, inspired by the flood. SouMa saw a message from a resident of the flooded community saying he wanted “water”. So SouMa started thinking regarding two different kinds of water, which should be the same but are completely different: “water that sustains life” and “water that takes life”. When she thought regarding how “water” was cut in, she thought it should be the same kind of water, but a completely different entity.
Even though she creates magical paper-cut works, SouMa has higher goals. Paper-cut works are often very delicate and detailed, giving people the feeling of “how are they made?”. She is always aware of this, but her goal is to create work that is not technically focused. The most hope is that the audience can feel the “charm” of the work in front of the real object.
If you are interested in SouMa’s paper-cut works, you may wish to go to herWeb page、IG、Twitterunderstand more.
