Along with Reveiller La Vie, from the previous year, Dawn is a masterpiece in the economic design of colour and form deployed to suggest the multitude of inner thoughts that Yoshida referred to as ‘an infinite number of elements to express.’ The design radiates from the red orb that lies half-veiled within the central space, which form is repeated and magnified by a larger, more numinous sphere of double the inner orb’s diameter. In Japan, (Nippon — 日本, the land of the rising sun) the sun has always been an auspicious symbol of nature’s bounty, and the Japanese flag, referred to as the hinomaru (日の丸), or the round (disc) of the sun, displays a red orb on a pure white field. The arrangement of surrounding colours, from the fundamental black and white to the gold, blue and green additions, extend the red orb’s influence by amplifying its radiating spread from the centre. The twin gold ‘wings’ spreading laterally suggest the first rays of the rising sun bursting over the horizon each morning, and some have seen these as representing the wings of a rising firebird whose head and tail feathers are subtly picked out in white above and below.