Butterflies—Swarming

In her butterfly series, Yoshida Chizuko captures themes of fragility and resilience, transience and renewal, and the balance between repetition and variation in nature. The inspiration came from a single butterfly she saw one evening in the Japanese Alps— “as pretty as a goddess, ” she recalled. “By turning the butterfly into many, I am representing the one.” In these works, butterflies emerge from a dense cluster at the bottom and fan outward, their colors shifting like the sky at dawn. For Chizuko, the butterfly’s strength lies in its ever-changing hues: “Their colors are not fixed; they change with the sun’s rays. It’s probably impossible to find a color that doesn’t exist among butterflies.” She used layered printmaking techniques to evoke this spectral richness: vivid reds, oranges, and pinks for spring; cool blues and greens for summer; dusky rose and amber for autumn; pale blues and grays for winter.