Paper artist a cut above the rest

A talented artist has been accepted by the Weihai Campus of Harbin Institute of Technology despite not meeting the learning’s criteria of the school.

Sun Hongtao has been enrolled, from Shandong Experimental High School, after the Weihai Campus lowered the admission threshold by 60 points due to his exceptional talent in the skill of paper folding art.

Every piece of art comes from a single square sheet of paper and Sun uses no glue or cuts. And as the pictures reveal, you can even find delicate leg joint details from the lifelike paper grasshopper folded by him.

The paper fire phoenix, made by a 70-centimeter wide paper, took the gifted artist almost 20 hours to complete, starting from a sketch design right up to construction.

Sun revealed he started paper folding as a hobby and says it comes easy to him, but did say it contained several important principles involved in mathematics and space structure.

The artist is currently teaching himself English so he can read paper folding instructions in foreign manuals in a bid to create even more realistic and ambitious models.

Sun has also mastered sketch drawing, compass and straight edge constructions. His paper folding artworks have been upgraded from imitation to personal design and creation.