French artist Mademoiselle Maurice has expanded her 'urban origami installations' to swathe the streets of Vietnam, Hong Kong and France.
The street art of Maurice is characterized by folding hundreds of origami forms in a spectrum of vivid colors, which she then applies to city facades and arranges them into different, often geometric, shapes.
The ongoing project began as homage to the symbolic paper crane, which is known not only as an international emblem of peace in Japan, but also exists in japanese culture as the 'Legend of the One Thousand Cranes'; to have a wish realized, one must fold 1000 cranes in paper.
Following the events of the march 11 2011, where the explosion of the nuclear plant of Fukushima occurred during the artist's visit, she decided to research Japanese literature and then participate in the tribute to Sadako Sasaki, a survivor of the hiroshima bomb who started acting upon the famous legend, however died after reaching only 644.
Ever since, children from all over Japan send these pleated birds to Hiroshima, in the memory of Sasaki where a memorial place has been created for her. Maurice decided to continue this tradition with her own interpretation, bedecking street walls with the pieces as a:
"Tribute to all the victims of the violent actions in our world. the message is hard, but speaking about in a dark manner wasn't necessary for me."
[via]