Koinobori

Koinobori are the carp-shaped wind socks raised for Tango no Sekku, the seasonal festival held on 5 May that survives in modern Children's Day. The carp itself derives from the legend of the fish that ascended a waterfall to become a dragon, making it a symbol of perseverance. Aida's aquatint condenses the streaming, body-filled-with-air quality of the cloth carp into the tonal vocabulary of the etched plate, where overlapping bites of acid produce the scaled patterning along the flank and the diaphanous mid-tones at the tail. The subject sits squarely within her treatment of fish and water imagery — a continuing thread tied to her childhood in Jindai-ji, the temple district in western Tokyo built around an old water shrine. Where her Echo Sounding works render submerged life, Koinobori treats the carp as it appears suspended in air, allowing the plate's reserved whites to read both as cloth and as the negative space of sky against which the streamers conventionally fly.