Nana Shiomi (born 1956) is a Japanese artist who studied printmaking at the RCA and has worked in the UK for 20 years. Her prints fuse influences from east and west. Japanese architecture and landscapes feature in her work, as does the idea of mirroring which is inherent in printmaking, with the block or plate and the print in opposite configurations. She works with woodcut, a tradtional technique but her work is inflected with the ideas and the perspective of someone who has lived for a long time outside Japan.

'7th May 1956, 8th May 1956' is a diptych arranged vertically, with both images printed from the same blocks in exactly the same way. Shiomi makes the point here that although prints are multiples and ostensibly identical, each print will also have minute differences in tone, shading, in the blurring of individual lines, and so on. The title also alludes directly to the passage of time (8th May 1956 is also Shiomi's birthdate) - and suggests the interval between making the two halves of the print. The image is of a wave (itself a repeating motion) which immediately calls to mind one of the most celebrated Japanese prints, Hokusai's The Great Wave (c.1830-31). Shiomi thus calls attention to her cultural and artistic heritage, but at the same time alludes to the inspiration of western conceptual art (she has often cited the ideas of Duchamp as a revelatory influence on her thinking and her development as an artist, though she chose to work in a traditional medium). Her prints embody a philosophy of creativity which takes equally from east and west, traditional and contemporary.