White Flounder

A white flounder — the flatfish rendered with the graphic attentiveness that Kimura brought to all his animal subjects. Flounder (hirame) were prized food fish in Japan, their white-sided bodies and both-eyes-on-one-side form one of nature's most unexpected asymmetries. Kimura's depiction of the white flounder likely uses the fish's flat, oval form and distinctive coloration — white on one side, brown or dark on the other — as the basis for a graphic composition that plays with bilateral asymmetry.