How Sachiko Abe found peace cutting paper
When it comes to art, traditionally, paper is covered in pencil and dampened by paint. It’s the blank canvas never thought of twice until decorated. However, Sachiko Abe felt differently. Delicate slivers of paper methodically cut make up her entire body of work, which itself is an ode to the joy she finds in it. She blends her work with performance, inviting audiences to watch as she sits elevated above them, raining down tiny strips of paper until she’s left with a white waterfall.
“Throughout my artistic career, my primary focus has been the issue of identity within modern society, in which individuals are categorised for what they are and how they function in maintaining economic machinery,” she once explained. Making paper the centrepiece of her artwork seems to address that, turning a functional item into beauty.
Abe’s enduring interest in paper began while she spent a spell in a mental institution in her early twenties, when cutting paper became a healthy alternative to hurting herself. Decades later, the connection between the paper and her mental health remains.
In an exhibition, she explained in a note that it took her 40 minutes to cut one whole piece: “The thinness is 0.5mm. During the depressed period, the thinness is about 0.3mm.”
Cut Papers remains her most famous piece and is often used as an example of the meditative quality of her work, which she refutes. She said: “Be warned, my work is neither beautiful nor meditational.” Although, it’s easy to see why some would assume both to be true. In Cut Paper, the sound of Abe’s scissors was the only measure of time passing, forcing her audience to experience the kind of presentness that mediation demands of its practitioners.
Microphones amplified the sound, honing the focus into the labour of making her mesmeric paper artwork. “The rhythm of the scissors, the fineness, and the length of the paper strip correspond to the process of my thinking and its effect on the body,” she explained. “While essentially personal, Cut Papers is a necessary practice for me to formulate my relationship to the external world.”
When Abe first started using paper as its own medium, she was said to have spent up to ten hours a day for 14 years dutifully cutting it. She’s previously revealed one sheet takes 40 minutes, so it roughly works out to be around 42,700 sheets that Abe cut in that time.
The culmination of those years can be seen as she sits from on high in her acclaimed performances. The paper is so thin it tumbles to the ground like silk because she imbues it with movement. While some see cobwebs, others ice, nobody ever sees paper.
