塩見奈々 Nana Shiomi (1956-Present)

Mitate, Mirrors, & the Other Side: The Woodcuts of Nana Shiomi

Born in Osaka in 1956, Nana Shiomi studied oil painting and printmaking at Tama Art University in Tokyo, completing BA and MA degrees, before moving to London in 1989 to study printmaking at the Royal College of Art. Woodblock became central to her practice, and living in Britain gave Shiomi a new perspective on the Japanese culture and imagery she had grown up with. Ideas of opposition and reflection - East & West, left & right, block & printed image, this side & the other side - have remained important throughout her work. Shiomi herself links these dualities directly to printmaking, where the carved block and resulting image exist in opposing configurations.

Shiomi is best known for 見立て百景 (One Hundred Views of Mitate), her major series of one hundred woodcuts begun in 1998 and completed eighteen years later in 2016. Across the series she takes familiar Japanese motifs - waves, bridges, clouds, pine trees, tea utensils, architecture and everyday objects - and places them within her highly recognisable world of earthen reds, yellow ochres and sharply receding perspective. Mitate (見立て) is a form of analogy, comparing one thing with another and allowing familiar symbols to take on new meanings through different combinations and associations. Rather than simply reproducing traditional imagery, Shiomi rearranges and reinterprets subjects deeply rooted in Japanese culture. Hokusai and Marcel Duchamp are particularly important reference points, while her wider work also engages directly with Cézanne, Dürer and Giorgio de Chirico.

Shiomi carves and prints her own blocks, combining relief and intaglio methods with water-based colour, Japanese paper and the baren, alongside her own experimental techniques and materials. Her work has been exhibited extensively in Britain, Japan and internationally, with repeated selections for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition from 1997 through to 2025. In 2019, edition 2/10 of the complete One Hundred Views of Mitate entered the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum; her work is also held by the British Museum, Ashmolean Museum and Pallant House Gallery, which acquired 29 of her works in 2023. In 2025, Shiomi was awarded a Life Honorary Fellowship by the President of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in recognition of her ongoing contribution and achievements in promoting printmaking.