Zhengzhe “JonJon” Yang and Gagan “G” Vaidyanathan, both A27, have a scientific bent. Yang is planning to major in biopsychology, while Vaidyanathan plans to focus on cognitive brain science. Since coming to Tufts, the two have been engaged in a long-term experiment that they’ve approached with their typical exacting rigor. But rather than a research lab, this particular experiment has played out in the papermaking studio at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. 

Yang and Vaidyanathan are origami enthusiasts. They met when Yang posted a picture of one of his origami creations to a social media group for newly accepted Tufts students. Vaidyanathan responded with one of his own, and the friendship took off like a flying crane.

Each appreciated the other’s origami style. Vaidyanathan gravitates toward symmetrical, Euclidean geometric shapes. “I find a lot of peace in repetitive structures—hexagons, pentagons,” he said. He spent months designing a model of a Carbon 60 molecule, composed of 60 sheets of paper locked together through folds into a spherical structure. 

Yang, on the other hand, finds inspiration in animals and plants, and likes his origami creations to reflect the imperfections he finds in nature. A frog he models may have one leg a little longer than the other or an eye that’s a bit squinty: “Not only does it make it more unique and personal to me, but it also exemplifies the fact that life isn’t always straight, always perfect.”

Despite their different aesthetics, both students had the same wish of having more control over the material they work with—namely, the paper. They felt limited by the textures and colors of the origami paper that was commercially available. So they talked about making their own. But could they make it thin enough? Many origami papers are less than half the thickness of a sheet of copy paper. 

To demonstrate, Yang picked up one of his creations, a cactus with tiny paper spines. “Each of these spikes, or really everything within it, has layers upon layers of folds,” he said. “So the only way to do this is with really thin paper.”

Could they make the paper thin enough?

They knew about SMFA at Tufts, of course, and read that it had a papermaking studio. But as first-year students with no art classes on their schedule, the idea of approaching the studio “was pretty daunting,” Yang said. “We had a lot of good ideas, but we just didn’t know how exactly we could reach out.”

So instead, they taught themselves everything they could. They researched necessary materials, read modern and historical papermaking documents, and gathered supplies, including paper pulp from a bulk supplier. They set up a workshop in the basement of Yang’s parents’ house in nearby Lexington, Massachusetts. 

The first samples they made, which they dried on a window screen, weren’t perfect. “We didn't have a proper way to evenly set the fibers,” Vaidyanathan said. The paper was patchy in spots and tore easily.

Then they learned about methyl cellulose, a chemical additive that can make paper less flexible and more crisp—important for accurate folds. Late one night, they headed to the basement of Tisch Library, where they had scoped out some long tables perfect for laying out sheets of paper. They mixed up methyl cellulose powder and water in a soup can and treated their samples. While the result was still too patchy to use, the texture was much closer to what they were looking for. 

They felt they had gotten about as far as they could on their own. So they found an email address for Louis Meola, AG19 (MFA), studio manager for print, paper, and graphic arts at SMFA, and told him of their quest to make thin paper for origami. 

When Meola receives student requests to use the studios for complex work like silk-screening or papermaking, he reconnoiters to see if they know enough to handle themselves or if they need to take a class first. So Meola invited Yang and Vaidyanathan to the studio, and he could see they had done their research. 

“They were very professional and organized,” Meola said. “They knew exactly what they wanted. They had a plan. They had a vision.”

‘It was honestly kind of mind-blowing’

Just in that first tour of the studio, the students could tell that while they had a lot to learn, their papermaking game was about to level up.   

“It was honestly kind of mind-blowing,” Yang said. Meola introduced them to the studio’s resources, which include mixers, stoves, pigments, drying boxes, molds, an enormous vacuum table to drain wet paper, and Hollander beaters—machines that turn plant fibers into paper pulp much more refined than the stuff the pair had been working with. He said they could use the studio anytime it wasn’t being used for classes.

On the first couple visits, Yang said, he felt out of place in the studio. But soon it seemed natural to walk in and start mixing ingredients.  

“The people who worked in the paper studio started recognizing us and remembering who we were,” he said. One art student shared some paper samples her grandfather had made. She then took them to see some of her own work drying on a rack. 

“It was some of the most beautiful colored paper I’ve ever seen,” said Vaidyanathan, “with blushes of green and blue and yellow.” A lot of commercially available origami paper is one color, or two at most. Seeing what the artist had done “made us really interested in the idea of dyeing paper and combining colors in a way that could be more evocative,” he said.

Yang and Vaidyanathan asked Meola if they could experiment with dyes and marbling, uncertain if they were overstepping, but the studio manager quickly got them started. 

“I tell students that all the time: If you know exactly what you want, it’s never a ‘no’, it’s ‘how do we get to a yes?’” Meola said.

They have approached the papermaking like the scientists they are, writing up a multi-page protocol that they revise as they experiment with new combinations of water, pulp, and chemicals. They take notes on how easy the different samples are to fold and how the paper feels under their fingers. “When it comes to the intricacies of folding paper that's very, very small, having the right thickness and having the right textured feel that we can fully control are extremely important,” Vaidyanathan said.

They have even achieved the weight they were aiming for, making papers so thin they could see light through the gaps in the fibers. 

Is their quest at an end? “We're getting there,” Vaidyanathan said. “I don't know if I will ever stop, because there are just endless possibilities and lots of models out there that all require their own different unique properties in paper.”

Meanwhile, the pair are launching a new student organization, the Origami Club, at Tufts. Among the events they have hosted was a recent workshop at the papermaking studio.

“People don’t really think of origami as an expressive art,” Yang said. “But I think what G and I are doing is allowing ourselves to put emotion into it.” And the papermaking studio gives them just that much more freedom to do so.