Within each of us, kenshō suggests, there is a self that has never been lost. It waits beneath the accumulated layers of experience, expectation, and habit, patient and intact. This print holds that idea with warmth and stillness. A larger figure sits in quiet meditation, eyes closed, arms folded around something small and alive held at its centre. The inner figure looks outward, wide-eyed, wrapped loosely in cloth and holding a tool as if ready to begin. Above them both, light opens in a wide arc of gold and green. The image does not explain itself. It simply asks you to look, and to consider what you might find there.

Kayo Shinbu began with a notebook, working through pencil sketches to find the right way to hold the concept visually — exploring figures cradling smaller selves, a face looking into a mirror, a self wrapped and bound by layers. From those early studies, she moved to paper, drawing the composition by hand using Posca markers and Tombow pens, building the bold, clean linework that gives her illustration its quiet confidence. Colour came last, worked out digitally on iPad, where she tested and refined the warm palette of ochre, forest green, and terracotta that now anchors the final piece. The kanji 見性, kenshō, was woven into the composition, present in the sketches as both word and structure.