If You Like Emanuel Leutze, You'll Love Roger Shimomura

On the snowy night of December 25, 1776, the American revolutionary general George Washington led around 2400 troops across the Delaware River in a surprise attack on the Hessian mercenaries of the British forces.

His Continental Army had spent months fighting, with nothing to show for it. Victory was essential, for the men, and for the revolution.

In 2010, American-Japanese artist Roger Shimomura joined the crowd of imitators with his painting Shimomura Crossing the Delaware. Shimomura draws on the subject of Leutze's painting, but in a style indelibly associated with that of Japan - woodblock prints.

In doing so, he made a wry, provocative comment on the place of Japanese-Americans in American society and art, and the history of American-Japanese relations.

Shimomura was born in 1939 in Seattle, himself the son of second-generation Japanese-Americans. But when the USA entered the Second World War, he and his family were interned in Idaho under the Alien Enemies Act, suspending their rights as US citizens.

Shimomura himself takes the place of Washington, standing upright, dressed in revolutionary garb, with the Betsy Ross flag flying beside him. Rather than patriots, his boat is piloted by a group of samurai, styled in traditional Japanese dress.

The background of the image has changed, from the delaware river, to the San Francisco Harbor. With Angel Island, the processing centre for Asian immigrants, in the background.

Casting himself as an Asian general engaging in a surprise attack, Shimomura recalls the memory of when in 1941, the Japanese Empire launched a surprise air attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbour.

While Shimomura's painting recalls the irreverence, humour, and anti-naturalism of Pop Art - there's nothing heroic contained within Andy Warhol's Campbell soup tins.

Shimomura seems to be saying that American identity is contradictory, founded by conflict and immigration, locked in boom-bust cycles of aspiration and depression.