Toko’s Calligraphy: A Liberating Flow
Information
- Number of items exhibited
- 33
- Period
- Jan 6 (Mon.)–Mer 19 (Feb.) 2025
- Closed
- 2nd and 4th Saturdays, Sundays, national holidays
- Admission
- ¥500, children through high school age free of charge.
- Event
- ○Gallery Talk by museum curator
(advance reservations unnecessary; meet at the Toko Gallery reception desk)
Date: Jan. 18 (Sat.), Feb. 15 (Sat.), 2025
Time (both days): 2:00 p.m. (about one hour)
About the Exhibition
Shinoda Toko was at once an abstract artist using sumi as a medium and a calligrapher. Propelled throughout her century-long career by her constant search for new forms of expression, she sought to discover distinctive forms of her very own. Her sumi expressed the forms, not of actual things that she had seen, but rather of such things as the shifts of season or time, the subtle swings of quotidian sentiments, or spontaneously arising and fleeting thoughts, drawn out from within her where they accumulated and were sublimated to the abstract.
The second-century Chinese calligrapher and poet Cai Yong, who said that calligraphy was the most visual expression of a person’s spirit, famously wrote of the “liberating” force of calligraphy. In Toko’s calligraphy, we can sense within her characters and calligraphy the solitary individual submerged deep within them.
Our exhibition here introduces calligraphic works from among the 1018 pieces in the Museum’s collection that display an artistry as exquisite as an abstract work of one stroke. This is an exhibition transcending the dynamic abstract wall mural works for which she is known and savoring instead the world that quietly unfolds from her calligraphy.