Yayoi Kusama's Dawn (1989) takes a subject almost entirely absent from her printed output — a bird, specifically a rooster or exotic crested bird perched on a branch — and submits every surface of the creature to a different arrangement of marks, the image as richly coloured and densely worked as any of the flower and butterfly compositions but with a subject that carries its own weight of symbolism in both Eastern and Western traditions. The bird occupies the full height of the image, its body in teal blue covered in white, pink and yellow dots of varying sizes scattered across the chest and back, its wing in deep red-brown with blue geometric shapes and white dot lines, its crest in orange covered in large red-orange circles, its legs and the branch it perches on in blue with a rectangular brick-like pattern. A small red flower on a green stem extends from its beak — the bird as messenger, the flower as its offering.

Every zone of the bird's body carries a distinct vocabulary of marks, the teal chest in one system, the russet wing in another, the orange crest in a third, the whole creature a compendium of the marking approaches Kusama had developed across the previous three decades. The rooster in Japanese culture is associated with the dawn, with the announcement of a new day, with clarity and vigilance — the bird that calls the sun. The title makes this reading explicit.

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