Image of Gallery in South Kensington
Request to view at the Prints & Drawings Study Room, level C , Case MB2G, Shelf DR112, Box MP343

'Mirror Room - Katsura'

Print
2006 (made)
Artist/Maker
Place of origin

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.

‘Mirror Room – Katsura’ represents traditional Japanese architecture, but as Shiomi has said, it is an architecture which is striking in its modernity, using space in a very rational way, and fostering a minimalist aesthetic. This print, with mirror images on either side of a central axis, plays with the ideas of reversal inherent in printing from a wood block or printing plate. 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.


Object details

Category
Object type
Title'Mirror Room - Katsura' (assigned by artist)
Materials and techniques
Colour woodblock on paper
Brief description
Nana Shiomi: 'Mirror Room - Katsura' 2006. Colour woodblock print
Physical description
A view into a series of room separated by partitions, presented as a mirror image around a veritcal central axis.
Dimensions
  • Height: 59.5cm
  • Width: 134cm
Printed on 2 sheets, joined
Copy number
16/30
Marks and inscriptions
16/30 [Title in Japanese] Nana Shiomi 16/30 "MIRROR ROOM - Katsura -" Nana Shiomi (Inscribed below left-hand image: Edition number; title in Japanese; signature. Inscribed below right-hand image: edition number; title; signature. All in pencil.)
Subject depicted
Summary
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.

‘Mirror Room – Katsura’ represents traditional Japanese architecture, but as Shiomi has said, it is an architecture which is striking in its modernity, using space in a very rational way, and fostering a minimalist aesthetic. This print, with mirror images on either side of a central axis, plays with the ideas of reversal inherent in printing from a wood block or printing plate. 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.
Collection
Accession number
E.444-2010

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Record createdApril 22, 2010
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