Durer's Law of Printmaking -Twin Rhinos

Albrecht Dürer's 1515 Rhinoceros woodcut, made from a written description and a sketch rather than direct observation, has functioned as a touchstone in the history of European printmaking, copied and reproduced for centuries despite its anatomical inaccuracies. Shiomi's print pairs two rhinoceros figures, drawing on Dürer's profile composition but rendering it through mokuhanga rather than the cross-hatched intaglio idiom of the German original. The doubling invites comparison between the two printmaking traditions: Dürer's tonal modeling through carved line versus mokuhanga's flat color planes and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations applied with brushes and transferred via [baren](/glossary/baren) onto [washi](/glossary/washi). The 'Law of Printmaking' framing is wry—Dürer's image, copied across centuries, became its own kind of natural law for how a rhinoceros should look in print. Within Shiomi's output, this work belongs to a strand of conceptual prints that interrogate the medium itself, sitting alongside her Newton and Ptolemy/Copernicus titles as meditations on how printed images carry, distort, and codify knowledge across cultures and centuries.