Immediately after Tōkō Shinoda was born in China, her family returned to Japan. Her father’s love of calligraphy was one of the reasons she decided to devote herself to Japanese penmanship using ink (sumi) like her contemporary, Inoue Yūichi. It was after a stay in New York that Shinoda turned away from the traditional drawing technique of calligraphy and began working with abstract and expressive forms as in Unseen Forms #15. She draws with ink on silver paper which is then attached to four vertical strips of paper mounted on the canvas. Each line is applied to the canvas in one stroke with the painting tool, every colour overlay and gradation carefully considered by the artist. Her works allow content and form to merge.
Tōkō Shinoda (1913–2021)
Unseen Forms #15, 1964
Currently exhibited: Yes (Gallery: Lines against Limits)
Material: Ink and silver paint on silverpaper on canvas on wood
Size: 169.5 x 342.6 cm
Inv-Nr.: B_338
Keywords:
Previous owner: Betty Parson Gallery, New York; unknown
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, Shigeru Tokota Inc., Tokyo, 2015
Immediately after Tōkō Shinoda was born in China, her family returned to Japan. Her father’s love of calligraphy was one of the reasons she decided to devote herself to Japanese penmanship using ink (sumi) like her contemporary, Inoue Yūichi.
She mounted her first solo exhibition in Japan in 1936 and by 1953 her works were on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Numerous exhibitions followed, four alone at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. From 1956 to 1958 she lived in New York where she became acquainted with works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. She later described the abstract expressionist artists as ‘very generous people’ with whom she could ‘exchange ideas and opinions about our work'[1].
Upon returning to Japan in 1958, Shinoda turned away from the traditional drawing technique of calligraphy and began working with abstract and expressive forms as in Unseen Forms #15 where she draws with ink on silver paper which is then attached to four vertical pieces of paper attached to the canvas. One of the special features of Shinoda’s œuvre lies in her painting style: each individual line is applied to the canvas in one stroke with the painting tool, every colour overlay and gradation carefully considered by the artist. Her works allow content and form to merge. Shinoda’s reputation grew over time as much in Japan as in the USA. Among her best-known works is the mural commissioned in 1974 for the Zōjō-ji temple in Tokyo, which spans 29 metres and three panels. Tōkō Shinoda died in Tokyo in 2021, four weeks before her 108th birthday.
[1] Tōkō Shinoda, in: Ben Munroe: ‘Lines that speak volumes’, in: Business Times Singapur, 3.1.1998, p. 17.
