Dragon Fly

The dragonfly (tonbo) has a long lineage in Japanese visual culture, ranging from samurai armour decoration — where its forward-only flight earned it the name kachimushi, the winning insect — to Edo-period kachō-e prints of insects and flowers. Aida's aquatint takes the insect as a single isolated motif, which suits the medium's capacity to render translucent wings: the rosin ground, bitten lightly, produces the suspended grey of veined gauze, while heavier bites mark the segmented body and the large compound eyes. The composition belongs to her engagement with the natural world that she has continued since her training at Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku and her relocation to London. Dragonflies in particular fit her preference for waterside fauna; the insects breed in still water and are common around Japanese temple ponds of the kind she grew up near at Jindai-ji. As with much of her work, the print favours close observation over decorative stylisation, treating the subject in tonal rather than line-led terms — closer in temperament to a study than to the hard-edged graphic dragonflies that recur in later twentieth-century Japanese woodblock printmaking.