How does a small square of paper – flat and flaccid – metamorphose into a lifelike Longhorn beetle or Red-tailed hawk without a single cut or a drop of glue? In the hands of master origami artist Robert Lang, anything is possible. Take a close look at Lang’s pieces and you’ll notice not just the accuracy of his renderings – the detail of the tarantula’s exoskeleton, the sharpness of the hermit crab’s antennae – but also the object’s less tangible character traits.

“One of the things I try to do is capture the emotional impact of a subject,” he says. “It’s not enough to say I’ve got the same number of legs as a real tarantula. I want you to feel the same thing that I feel when I look at one. A certain position of a flap one way just looks like a crumpled flap, but you position it differently and it looks like a leg. That part is much more intuitive – you have to know what works.”

Art and science converge organically for Lang, whose right-brain and left-brain aptitudes perfectly complement each other. Lang worked as a physicist and engineer for many years, both at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Labs, and holds dozens of patents in optics and semiconductor lasers. But it was his knowledge of origami that got him hired to engineer an airbag design and an expandable space telescope.

What keeps him still so enthralled with origami, toiling away as he does in his Bay Area home creating a veritable paper wildlife refuge, is his love of animals. From the time he was a young boy, Lang loved tramping in the woods and inspecting the natural world around him. “Part of my motivation for folding creepy things is that I love the actual subjects,” he says.

Lang’s quest for that indefinable realism has inspired him to create more than 500 original origami designs and eight books on the subject: Each time he finds a flaw in one piece, he goes back to square one and a new “opus” is born. “Somewhere down the road I’ll see flaws,” Lang says. “It’s usually deep and structural, something that had forced me into a non-optimal representation that somehow got the proportion wrong or was too exaggerated. Then I’ll go back and redesign it in a completely new way.”

But don’t mistake his drive as a meaningless quest based on vanity – it’s part of his working process, and what he enjoys most about the art of origami.

“I don’t believe there’s perfection in origami,” he says. “The most I could say is that there are things I haven’t figured out how to improve upon, or flaws that haven’t been apparent to me yet. If I wait long enough, I’ll see the flaws, and I’ll figure out a way I can do it better in the future.”

Lang still marvels at the endless possibilities an uncut square of paper holds. “There seems to be no limit to what can be accomplished, and it’s always surprising,” he says. “You’d think that people would’ve long ago figured out all of what could be done, but in fact we’re nowhere near the limit. That continues to be what’s so wonderful about origami, and conversely, what keeps me going I love creating something new or beautiful and interesting, and doing it with such limited materials.”