White Butterfly — 白い蝶

A white butterfly — Shiroi Cho — rendered in Kimura's contemporary woodblock style. The butterfly was one of Japanese art's most enduring subjects, associated with the brevity of beauty, transformation, and — in a philosophical tradition drawing on Zhuangzi's famous dream — the uncertainty of identity and consciousness. Kimura's white butterfly strips the subject of its more decorative associations, presenting the insect through the bold graphic language of contemporary printmaking: decisive line, flat color, the butterfly as pure form.