dae lee life

Boxed Culture

Lately I have been taking pictures to make it into postcards so that I could send it to people. Sadly, I haven’t found any decent printing services yet. 

So I decided to make a hand made postcard brought up by my fascination with pop-ups.

Here are some pictures of my latest postcard “Boxed Culture” 

The card measures 8.5cm when closed, and 17cm when opened. The cube size measures 3 cubic centimeters. You say what is this measurement-math madness?! It took a lot of math to actually make this project a tangible one. Yes, I even imagined being an architect.

The pattern was inspired by the design in Korean palaces.

Since you can not see how the pop-up works, I shall post a .gif file of it soon… and also the making of this project.

I shall experiment more with paper.

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art paper cutout postcard

The Making of: Boxed Culture

You have seen the .gif file in the previous entry, now look at how it was made! 

But before anything else, I got really sick and tired of working on the floor and I thought getting a new long table would be a great investment. Thanks to the fast online shopping system here in Korea, the table came in as soon as I ordered it online. Good job Korea. The only problem was that I had to take the money out of my grocery funds. No cheese and sweets for me for a while!

It’s all about the planning. I wanted a pop-up card that would form a cube when opened. Like BAM! a CUBE!… YEAH! OPEN! BAM! CUBE! Okay… I experimented on several pieces of paper and started out with a rough draft of what I visualized in my head. To my horror, I realized that I needed the help of math in this project. (You might be thinking: “Dae is Korean… so he must be good in math.” Well, sadly, I am not… so stop the stereotyping.)

It’s all about the math. After the initial draft, it was time to put the formulas into use. And math is so much easier when you know the “x”. The math was mind-blasting! I really thought my head was going to explode. I was so happy that the math was done! It kind of felt it was easy… TOO EASY.

And the moment you think everything is easy and fine, it hits you. YES. MORE. MATH. (I just had to get inspiration from a Korean palace pattern… Well I guess we are artists like that… we try to challenge ourselves to death and complain why it is so hard… when in reality we brought it to ourselves.)

I had to take a break from all the math so I started cutting my-self made artwork. A quiet room with the sound of the sharp blade going through the paper - magical.

After the fist pattern was cut, I literally spent about an hour happy with the outcome. I felt so happy. Then after an hour of measuring and more math, I went back to silence to hear the music that the blade and paper made.

I broke the tips of 4 blades while making this one. The patterns were so small that if the blade was not sharp enough, it would destroy hours of hard work.

Finally, the patterns were done… I felt so happy.

After another hour of staring at the cutout, it was time to paste it into the card. This was a make or break situation. If the calculation was wrong, all the hard-work will be down the drain. But thankfully math did not let me down after years of constantly hearing curses from me.

Thank you math. But you are too perfect for me. I want my art to feel more… natural.

Missed the .gif file of the completed project? Click here!

Welcome to my daeleelife.

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art the making of paper