Takuma Shiratani (b. 1994, Saga, Japan) graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2019 and completed his MFA in Sculpture at the same university in 2021. Working primarily in wood, particularly Japanese cypress, Shiratani uses origami as a motif to explore the Japanese cultural practice of mitate—the act of seeing one thing as another—and the sense of prayer and spirituality that lies beyond it. What Shiratani finds in origami goes beyond the beauty of its simplified forms. Through the simple act of folding a single sheet of paper, familiar figures such as horses and cranes emerge. Rather than faithfully reproducing reality, these forms embody the essence of mitate, evoking the character of their subjects through only a few essential elements. In the imaginative space created by this abstraction, Shiratani sees the possibility of opening our perception toward a world beyond immediate reality. Central to his practice is the idea of “carving the act of folding.” He translates forms born from thin, weightless paper into sculptures carved from solid, substantial wood. By reconsidering folds and planes through a sculptural perspective, seemingly opposing qualities—flatness and volume, lightness and weight, delicacy and strength—come to coexist within a single form. Shiratani is also drawn to origami in its unfinished state, finding in these unstable, incomplete forms a sense of openness and possibility: the moment before something becomes something else. Shiratani further associates the act of folding with prayer and with the idea of something descending or manifesting into this world. In Japanese culture, things that mediate between this world and realms beyond have often been given temporary or symbolic forms. In this sense, Shiratani regards origami not simply as a representation of something real, but as a kind of vessel through which the presence of another world might momentarily enter our own. Using materials and techniques that have been passed down in Japan for centuries—including Japanese cypress, urushi lacquer, and mineral pigments—Shiratani transforms the ephemeral forms of paper into sculptures capable of enduring through time. Beginning with the familiar language of origami, his works seek to reveal, through the act of carving, the mystery and forms of prayer that reside within the practice of mitate.