The art of cut paper, kiri-e in Japanese, appears in many cultures and takes many forms. In Japan, it goes back to the Heian period, the period of Genji my love, when elaborately cut paper was used to create stencils for textile printing. The art which evolved from this has become very beautiful -- as the examples shown here illustrate -- blending not only the design but also the colors and textures of the paper itself. This contrasts say, with the beautiful North-African paper cutting art, which uses only monochromatic paper of plain texture, but relies on the elaborateness of the cut for its effect.
Why does kiri-e appeal to us? Not only are the pictures aesthetically pleasing, but they were also created by a process more akin to sculpture than to painting -- a process of deletion rather than one of addition. It is an old joke that the way to make a marble sculpture of a horse is simple -- one simply takes a big block of marble and chisels away everything that doesn't look like part of a horse.
	There is a lesson here: harmony and beauty can be created not just by continually adding things to what already exists, but sometimes by selectively deleting the unnecessary and the useless. That is what I feel impelled to do much of the time.

All of the above examples of kiri-e are by the contemporary Japanese artist Masaaki Endo. Aren't they just lovely!