Andrew left an engineering and business career in 2017 to care for his school age children and pursue his lifelong dream of becoming an artist. He is strongly influenced by the Renaissance period where artists were engineers and vice versa. As he was an engineer for a materials company for over a decade, Andrew takes great care in the choice of materials he uses, considering both technical and symbolic factors. While Andrew’s artistic practice is mainly in Origami, he enjoys the process of creation every single day with each medium before him.
Andrew strives to imbue his pieces with full the expression of his being. Each aspect of his creations draws on his life experience.
His pieces are known for their strong sense of motion with birds soaring, banking and diving. Andrew delights in recreating flight as he has been enamored with it since a teenager. When he learned that there was a program called the Royal Canadian Air Cadets he signed up right away and earned a glider and power pilot’s license over the next few years. Throughout his engineering and now art career, he always found a way to rekindle his passion for aerodynamics and flight.
The question he most often gets is how long it takes to make his pieces because of the painstaking amount of labour it must take to fold and place all the little origami birds. The irony is not lost on Andrew who studied all the way to MIT and earned a Master’s specializing in Advanced Manufacturing (aircraft of course). He studied every possible way to automate and manufacture things but he has folded over 10,000 origami by hand. It was being an immigrant’s son that taught him that lesson. His father also studied engineering in Taiwan but worked as a labourer for an extended time in Toronto. So, there ALWAYS seemed to be a few tons of rocks to move or trees to cut growing up. While Andrew was trying to figure out an elegant solution to ease his burdens, his father taught him that sometimes, it just takes one shovel full at a time to move that mountain.
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