Toko Series 1: Momo no Fu: Sources of Inspiration

About the Exhibition

The Toko Series exhibitions trace the work of artist Toko Shinoda in four parts based on the chapters of Momo no fu: Scenes from a Century, the volume published in 2013 commemorating the artist’s 100th birthday. The first in the series, “Sources of Inspiration,” looks back at the starting point and wellspring of Toko’s ink painting, chronicling the background from which she achieved an aesthetic of universal appeal transcending East and West.
Born in Dalian, Manchuria in 1913, she returned to Japan before the age of two and has lived her long life mainly in Tokyo ever since. Toko herself never resided in Gifu prefecture, but because her father Raijiro’s birthplace was the village of Akutami in the northeastern area of the present-day city of Gifu near the Nagara river, Gifu was for her the country home village of her father and a place to which she felt special attachment. Since it was her father who first put a brush and an inkstick in six-year-old Toko’s hands, we may look to this Gifu landscape for something of the source of inspiration for a woman who became an artist of abstract sumi painting known around the world.