Mirror Room -Katsura

Mirror Room -Katsura belongs to Shiomi's Mirror Room series, in which interior spaces are constructed as compositions of reflected geometry. The subtitle Katsura points to Katsura Rikyu, the seventeenth-century imperial villa in Kyoto whose architecture — its modular shoji grids, tatami proportions, and engawa thresholds — has long served as a touchstone for Japanese artists exploring spatial restraint. Shiomi's translation of these architectural rhythms into woodblock print exploits mokuhanga's capacity for flat planes of tonally subtle color, registered with the precision required to suggest interlocking rectangles of paper, wood, and shadow. The mirror conceit doubles the architectural elements, generating compositions in which symmetry and slight asymmetry are held in tension. Within Shiomi's wider body of work, the Mirror Room series stands somewhat apart from her water and vegetation prints, foregrounding constructed space rather than organic form, while sharing her interest in how the woodblock medium registers the meeting of structure and atmosphere.