Master of the Monster Bird III

Master of the Monster Bird III is the third variation in Asahi's recurring series of bird-tamers, in which a female figure is paired with an oversized invented bird drawn from her private mythology rather than from kacho-e tradition. As an intaglio print, the work depends on the interplay between bitten line — used for the bird's plumage, the figure's hair and garment, and the contours of both — and aquatint, which carries the surrounding tonal field. Numbering a print III within a sequence is consistent with Asahi's habit of returning to the same protagonist across separate plates, treating each as a different episode rather than a reissue of the same image. The monster-bird is one of her core invented creatures, alongside the water dragon and the traveling music spirits, and series of this kind constitute much of her published output since the 1990s. The print would have been pulled in a small numbered edition, signed in pencil beneath the platemark.