Salmon - A (refers to His Mouth Open, Saying Ah)

A mezzotint study of a single salmon, its parenthetical title indicating the open-mouthed posture of the fish. The reference to ah pairs with the iconographic A-un opposition familiar from Buddhist temple guardian figures, where one figure's mouth is open on a and the other's closed on un. The salmon held particular significance for Hiroshima through his long collaboration with the American artist Rick Bartow, of Wiyot heritage, for whom the salmon was a recurrent subject; Hiroshima pulled most of Bartow's editioned mezzotints from his Tokyo press. This 2010 print sits within that working relationship and within Hiroshima's own broader interest in animals rendered in close tonal study. The mezzotint technique allows the wet-skinned, scaled body of the fish to be modeled out of dense black through carefully graded burnishing, with the open mouth left as a recovered area of lighter tone at the head.