Toko Shinoda Art Month 2014: Solitary “Toko’s Words”

About the Exhibition

In 1979 Toko Shinoda won the 27th Japan Essayist Club Award for her first essay collection Sumi iro (The Color of Sumi). The words of her many subsequent essays are the expression of fragments of thought that crossed her mind day to day. Just as a chance hue of sumi ink captures the momentary movements of her mind to produce shapes, her words catch what happens to come to her mind that she is not aware of as thought. Those words are sustained by the distinctive aesthetic she has refined through her 100-year life.
With “beauty” as the keyword, this exhibition is an attempt to understand Toko’s aesthetic from both her works as well as from excerpts from her essays.