Toko Shinoda: Impulse from Within

About the Exhibition

Although characters are her basic elements, she places greater emphasis on the work seen in its entirety in the context of abstract painting than on the meaning of each character. Even if she has been away from the work of calligraphy for a while, she writes in an essay, when she rubs the sumi inkstick over her inkstone and takes up her brush, she sometimes feels the impulse to brush characters. When she experiences this unannounced impulse, she imagines characters and tries to give them some kind of visible form.
This exhibition shows some of the works by Toko—whose close relationship with calligraphy began when she was a young girl—that feature her favorite characters and phrases.