Shonibare was born in London, grew up in his parents' native Nigeria and returned to London to study fine art at the Byram Shaw college of art and Goldsmiths College. His position as both insider and outsider in the cultures he straddles is crucial to his work.

Shonibare parodies European culture and cultural works in photographic tableaux and three-dimensional sculpted figures, dressed in or made of such 'traditional African' fabrics as batik — which actually originated in Indonesia and was exported around the world by Dutch and British colonists, and which the artist now buys at Brixton market in south London. But Shonibare does not use parody for its own sake. He is interested in the resonances of combinations of seemingly incompatible elements within a strong western tradition.

In Shonibare's world (and, he encourages us to suspect, in our own), cultures and histories shift about. Western thought's monolithic sense of itself is undermined. New ways of thinking about the world, relating to history, race, ethnicity and culture, are introduced in a riot of colour and with humour. This is a non-didactic political art which creates questions in the mind rather than simply posing and answering a political point.

'I thought: well, those issues have been well raised, and I felt that it's been done,' Shonibare said in an interview in 2001, talking about black and feminist art of the 1970s and early 1980s. 'Wouldn't it be good to just surprise people! Black people can laugh too. We are not serious all the time.' In fact, despite the humour, Shonibare touches on some of the issues addressed by those earlier, perhaps more theory-based artists, but with a lighter touch.

Yinka Shonibare has been shortlisted for his exhibition 'Double Dutch' at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, which features some of the work reproduced in these pages, and for his solo show of paintings, 'Play With Me', at the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.