Kirigami: The Japanese Art of Paper Cutting and Folding

Take a sheet of paper, make a row of parallel cuts, and pull the edges. The sheet stretches. The cuts open into diamond-shaped holes, and a flat surface becomes a flexible lattice that can bend, curve, and conform to shapes the original sheet could not. This is kirigami in its simplest form, and in 2025 researchers at Sichuan University and McGill University used exactly this principle to develop a geometric method for designing kirigami structures that can be programmed to deploy into specific three-dimensional shapes. The same art that produces delicate paper flowers and pop-up greeting cards is now being used to design acoustic walls, soft robots, and deployable space structures.

Kirigami is the Japanese art of cutting and folding paper to create three-dimensional forms. The word combines kiri (to cut) and kami (paper). Unlike origami, which prohibits cutting, kirigami embraces cuts as a primary design tool. Cuts allow the paper to expand, contract, bend, and pop up in ways that folding alone cannot achieve. The practice has been recognized as an Intangible Cultural Heritage and has become a source of inspiration for fields ranging from flexible electronics to architecture.

This entry covers what kirigami is, how it developed from a traditional craft into an engineering methodology, which practitioners and researchers defined it, and how it functions today at the intersection of art and science.

What Is Kirigami?

Kirigami involves creating patterned cuts on a flat, thin sheet to achieve bending, twisting, contraction, and extra elongation when force is applied. With rationally designed cut patterns, kirigami demonstrates unconventional mechanical properties, including super-stretchability, auxetic behavior (negative Poisson's ratio, where material expands laterally when stretched), bistability, and on-demand buckling. The cuts transform a rigid sheet into a mechanism: a structure with controlled, predictable movement.

The basic kirigami techniques include pop-up kirigami, where cuts and folds create structures that rise from the flat sheet; fractal kirigami, where cut patterns repeat at multiple scales; tessellation kirigami, where cuts form repeating geometric patterns across the sheet; and ribbon kirigami, where thin strips of material are cut and manipulated. Each technique produces different mechanical and visual properties.

A 2025 review published in Advanced Intelligent Systems traced the development of kirigami from compliant mechanism to multifunctional robot. The review classified kirigami into two categories from a compliant mechanism perspective: lumped compliance kirigami (including fractal, tessellation, pop-up, zigzag, and lattice kirigami) and distributed compliance kirigami (including ribbon, perforated, and expansile kirigami). The review noted that kirigami has transcended its artistic boundaries to become a source of inspiration for flexible electronics, metamaterials, shape-morphing structures, and soft robotics. Read the study at Advanced Intelligent Systems.

Origins and History

Traditional Roots

Kirigami, or jianzhi in Chinese, is an art of paper-cutting that has been practiced throughout the world for centuries. Using simple tools like scissors, artisans transform paper into intricate designs featuring flowers, animals, or characters. The Chinese tradition of paper-cutting dates back over 1,500 years, with the earliest surviving examples being five round flower paper cuttings from the Northern Dynasty, unearthed from the ancient tomb of Astana in Turpan Basin, Xinjiang. In Japan, kirigami developed alongside origami as a complementary practice, with cuts used to create decorative elements that folding alone could not produce.

The consolidation of kirigami as a distinct named practice, separate from general paper-cutting, occurred primarily in the 20th century. The term "kirigami" entered international use as the practice circulated through exhibitions and educational networks, paralleling the internationalization of origami.

Pop-Up Books and Commercial Kirigami (19th-20th Century)

The pop-up book tradition, which began in the 19th century, represents one of the most commercially successful applications of kirigami principles. Lothar Meggendorfer's movable books, produced in Germany in the 1880s, used complex cut-and-fold mechanisms to create scenes that sprang to life when the page was opened. The pop-up structures in these books are pure kirigami: cuts define the moving elements, and folds provide the hinges that allow them to rise from the flat page.

Kirigami as Engineering (2000s-Present)

The transformation of kirigami from a craft into an engineering methodology began in the 2000s and accelerated dramatically in the 2010s. Researchers realized that the cut patterns used in traditional kirigami could be designed systematically to produce specific mechanical behaviors. By controlling the geometry, size, and arrangement of cuts, engineers could program how a sheet would deform under load. This insight opened applications in fields that have nothing to do with paper: kirigami-inspired cut patterns have been applied to graphene sheets, polymer films, metal plates, and composite materials at scales ranging from nanometers to meters.

Key Figures and Works

Pop-Up Book Designers

Robert Sabuda is one of the leading contemporary pop-up book artists. His The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Commemorative Pop-Up (2000) demonstrates the technical sophistication of modern kirigami, with a spinning tornado, a melting witch, and a balloon that rises from the page. Matthew Reinhart, another leading pop-up engineer, created Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs (2005) with Sabuda, featuring pop-up dinosaurs with moving jaws and limbs. These works are commercial kirigami at its most ambitious, and they demonstrate that the principles of cut-and-fold engineering can produce objects of genuine artistic complexity.

Katia Bertoldi and the Kirigami Metamaterial Community

Katia Bertoldi, a professor of applied mechanics at Harvard, has been a central figure in the development of kirigami as an engineering methodology. Her research group has published extensively on kirigami-inspired metamaterials, demonstrating how cut patterns can be designed to produce materials with programmable mechanical properties. The 2017 paper "Flexible mechanical metamaterials" in Nature Materials showed that kirigami cuts could transform a sheet into a structure that stretches far beyond the material's original capacity, a finding with direct applications in soft robotics and deployable structures.

Chuan Qiao and Damiano Pasini (2025)

Qiao, a former PhD student at McGill University, and Pasini published a 2025 paper in Physical Review Letters that unveiled a fundamental geometric relationship between the shape of rotating units in a kirigami pattern and the shape of the deployed kirigami. Their method allows the inverse design of kirigami without numerical computation, using a simple area-preserving map to program the shear deformation of a kirigami specimen. Pasini described the approach as a "swift, versatile manner" of programming kirigami that "foregoes any numerical computations." Read more at Phys.org.

Google DeepMind and RL-Kirigami (2025-2026)

In 2025-2026, researchers published RL-Kirigami, an inverse design framework that combines optimal-transport conditional flow matching with reinforcement learning to generate compatible kirigami cut patterns. The system uses Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to align the generator with non-differentiable rewards for silhouette matching, feasibility, and ratio-field regularity. A single sample from the pretrained generator reached 94.2% shape intersection-over-union and outperformed solver baselines while reducing forward simulator evaluations from hundreds to one. Generated layouts were exported to DXF and laser cut in 50-micrometer polymeric sheets to produce deployable prototypes. Read the paper at arXiv.

Jingyang Liu and the Programmable Thick Kirigami Team (2026)

A 2026 paper presented at the CAADRIA conference by Jingyang Liu and colleagues at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University introduced a computational workflow for programmable thick kirigami. Most existing kirigami methods assume zero material thickness, limiting their applicability to real-world architectural materials. The team's workflow integrates mesh mapping, thickness-aware unfolding, and kinematic simulation to generate manufacturable 2D cut-fold patterns. As a proof of concept, they designed and fabricated a kirigami-based acoustic wall composed of 67 distinct units in 3 mm cardboard, demonstrating that material thickness can be integrated into the folding and unfolding pipeline. Read the paper at CAADRIA 2026.

Kirigami in Architecture and Engineering

Kirigami has become an influential approach in design, engineering, and architecture. The ability to fabricate complex 3D geometries from flat sheets reduces tooling, waste, and production complexity. Applications include adaptive facades that respond to sunlight, lightweight deployable structures for space missions, and responsive shading systems. A 2026 paper on reconfigurable hinged kirigami tessellations explored how planar tilings can be cut into rotationally deployable structures that realize target curvatures through local combinatorial changes. This research extends kirigami beyond simple cut-and-fold patterns into a design space where the connectivity of the structure itself becomes programmable.

In soft robotics, kirigami-inspired cut patterns are used to create actuators that grip, crawl, and swim. The cuts allow the material to deform in controlled ways when pressurized, producing movement without motors or joints. Kirigami-based metamaterials can also tune wave propagation and filter specific frequencies, with applications in acoustic engineering and vibration control.

Related Terms

Kirigami is closely related to origami, which shares the folding dimension but prohibits cutting. It connects to papercutting, the broader tradition of decorative paper cutting that includes Chinese jianzhi and European scherenschnitte. The engineering dimension links kirigami to generative art, where algorithms produce form, and to fractal art, where self-similar patterns repeat at multiple scales. For more on paper as an art medium, read our post on paper art, or explore our guide to Japanese art to see how kirigami fits into the broader Japanese craft tradition.

See Kirigami in Person

Traditional kirigami and paper-cutting works are held in several major collections. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds Dutch papercuttings from the 17th to early 18th centuries, including works by Joanna Koerten, one of the most celebrated paper-cutting artists of the Dutch Golden Age. The Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe holds paper-cutting works from multiple traditions. The China National Art Museum in Beijing holds Chinese paper-cutting works, including pieces designated as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

For contemporary kirigami and pop-up art, the Movable Book Society hosts exhibitions and conferences. For kirigami as engineering, the demonstrations produced by research groups at Harvard, MIT, and McGill University are documented in their publications and online. To understand how kirigami connects to broader paper art traditions, read our entries on origami and papercutting, or explore our post on paper art for a comprehensive look at paper as a sculptural medium.