What a real crazy time I had at the Bard Summer Theater Intensive! In the span of a month in Berlin, we students watched experimental theater, learned from theater and dance workshops, and composed original works. I'm quite proud of what my group came up with, so here it is!

(Photographs by Vera Yung)

 As an origami practitioner, I asked myself:

I attempted to answer these question through my first-ever origami performance piece that debuted at the Make It Share It Open Stage.

(Photos: Beverly Yuan)

Photos: Jonathan Sachs, MIT SHASS Communications

As an MIT freshman I was 100% sure that I would study math, but I mused about how funny it would be if I dropped all that for theater or some other drastic switch like that. Well, that didn't exactly happen, but over one and a half years I've discovered and developed an unexpected interest in acting.

This November, I acted in my first-ever play: Everybody, an existential dark comedy about finding somebody to die with you. This contemporary adaptation of the fifteenth-century morality play The Summoning of Everyman inaugurated MIT's new theater building (MIT News). Its underlying narrative appears in many cultures: a journey towards death, in which the protagonist learns that they cannot bring their possessions and people with them—except for one, which teaches them what is most important in life. I learned so much from my director Anna Kohler and my wonderful fellow actors!

Here is a (private) clip from my performance, followed by a reflection on the creative process as an actor.

My interest in art led me to take the Introduction to Art History course at MIT. I learned the most by thinking very hard about the essay assignments, one of which asked me to analyze the importance of authenticity in art--if it is important at all! We were to look at the case of the 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn, because it had been notoriously hard to figure out which paintings were actually made by him. I spent way more time than necessary contemplating the issue and putting my thoughts together. Prof. Kristel Smentek, who taught the class, gave comments on drafts of this essay that guided how I developed it further. The essay recently won the Kelly Essay Prize for Excellence in Humanistic Scholarship. I hope you find it an intriguing read!

Check out the other amazing art pieces in the Jaffa Museum's abums below! Vincent Floderer's haunting "sea creatures" fashioned out of crumpled paper are some of my favourites.

Origami? Folding bits of paper? You mean that children's pastime? It can't possibly be of any "real" use, right?
What if I told you that origami has been applied in space technology?

The 6th International Meeting on Origami in Science, Mathematics and Education (6OSME) was held in Tokyo University in August to help origami researchers, artists and educators share their ideas on the connections between origami and a wide range of other fields, including applications in theory and industry.

Next week I'm conducting an origami math workshop for Grade 8 students, and one of the activities will be to fold a skeletal octahedron (really simple modular origami). The students will be asked to choose between five octahedra I already folded in various colors, to see what kind of color schemes and arrangements appeal to them.  We can then discuss about symmetry, graph coloring and more.

It would also be interesting to see which color schemes people like, even before the workshop, so here goes!

Look behind Creation!
Exemplified in just a few given equations.
Crazy.

As part of my effort to expose myself to more art, today I attended Art Stage Singapore, which showcased more than 130 galleries' worth of art, mostly from the Asia-Pacific region. The six hours that I had weren't nearly enough for me to experience all of the art pieces there. Here's some of the pieces that I liked:

I also liked Malaysian artist Haslin Ismail's "Book Land", which cuts and assembles parts of books and other materials to form castles of fantasy and dioramas that bring the books' contents to life.

These days I hardly fold any origami, but when I do, it's usually from either of the books Origami Art or Advanced Origami, both by Michael G. Lafosse & Richard L. Alexander from their Origamido Studio. Their designs have this elegance and beauty that attract me, and leaves me satisfied when I am able to reproduce part of that beauty with my own hands.

So when I offered to fold a present for a friend, I asked him to choose from those books. He picked their Humpback Whale.