Travel Companion II

Travel is a recurring frame in Asahi's catalogue — her music spirits travel, her dragon-masters travel, her unnamed figures pass through landscapes she has invented for them. The title here names not the travel itself but the companion who accompanies it, and the 'II' places the plate as a return to a motif first treated in an earlier impression. The companion is likely one of her invented creatures: a small dragon, a monster-bird, or a hybrid being of the kind that populates her mythology rather than any specific folklore source. Etching allows the precise contour her creatures require — the linear armature of feathers, scales, or limbs — while aquatint sets them against the broader tonal field of road, water, or sky through which the journey passes. The plate belongs to the figural strand of her work in which a single figure or pair occupies the plate at relatively close range, in contrast to the wider landscape compositions she also produces. Travel companion plates have appeared in her catalogue intermittently across the 2000s and 2010s.