Sleeping Fish

The print combines three lithographic processes within a single image: drawing on stone for tonal passages, photo-plate lithography for areas transferred from a photographic source, and chine-collé to introduce an inset of thinner paper bonded during printing. Photo-plate work allows a found or staged photographic image to be carried into the lithographic vocabulary at full tonal range, so the sleeping fish—dormant, suspended, neither alive nor caught—can occupy the print as both observed body and reproduced trace. Stone passages soften and surround the photographic element, while the chine-collé layer establishes a discrete tonal ground beneath part of the image. Fish appear in Yokoo's 2018 output as bodies at rest, a motif consonant with his broader interest in bodily memory and ambiguous states between presence and absence. The technical layering—stone, plate, inset paper—corresponds to the layered ontology of the subject itself: a creature held between sleep and stillness, between life and specimen.