Being Lured by Timbre

"Being Lured by Timbre" (音色に誘われて, 2024) is a 50 × 43 cm etching produced during Koide's late-period Kanagawa studio practice. The Japanese title — "drawn in by tone color" — frames the work within a synesthetic abstraction that translates auditory sensation into visual incident, a premise that recurs across postwar Japanese sosaku-hanga where the print is treated as a record of the artist's direct response rather than a reproductive image. The intaglio process Koide favours produces a pulled line carrying the chemical evidence of acid bite, with wiping and burnishing controlling the residual plate tone. Compositions in this register typically combine threaded linear passages with broader bitten or aquatinted fields, the rhythm of marks functioning as a visual equivalent to musical phrasing. The work is consistent with her ongoing documented activity through the Japan Print Association and the New Art Association, and its presence in the 68th CWAJ Print Show 2025 situates it within the current generation of Japanese intaglio practice that descends from the sosaku-hanga emphasis on the artist as sole maker — designer, plate-maker, and printer.