Toko Shinoda and Her Achievements: “Toko and the Avant-garde”

About the Exhibition

In March this year, when the peach flowers were in full bloom, Toko Shinoda passed away, as if carried off by a spring breeze. She was 107 years old.
She made her debut as a calligrapher in the 1930s, attracting much attention as a promising female calligrapher. After the war she changed her medium of expression from calligraphy to painting and for decades took the lead in abstract art in sumi ink in Japan. Free from any constraints, her works have presented her own aesthetic in forms of sumi ink.
The exhibition series “Toko Shinoda and Her Achievements” looks back on her century-long career to review the numerous works produced along the way. This exhibition, the first in the series, shows her works from around 1950, when a major change began in the world of calligraphy in Japan, until 1956, when she left for the United States. It introduces how, amid the rise of the avant-garde in the new era following the end of the war, she struggled in the quest for a new form of her art—toward abstract expression.