Scent of Secret

Scent of Secret takes its place among the titled vignettes through which Ando builds her 'sinister storybook' world, where the language of the title hints at narrative withholding rather than describing a scene outright. The work is likely to centre on one of her recurring solitary figures — a girl in an elaborate dress, paired with a small animal, flower, or domestic object whose symbolic charge carries the implied secret. Technically, the etched plate establishes the linear drawing of figure and accessories, while chine collé bonds a thinner patterned or tinted Japanese paper into the impression during printing, producing a layered surface in which background passages sit at a different register from the main image. Hand-coloring is then applied over the printed sheet, giving the muted, slightly bruised palette that runs through her output. The combination of intaglio line, embedded paper, and applied colour aligns the print with her broader project of grafting nineteenth-century European print traditions onto a picture-book idiom rooted in her earlier career as a Japanese illustrator.