WILLIAM DAVIE

MOVEMENT AND STILLNESS, LIGHT AND DARK:
TOKO SHINODA’S PURSUIT OF TOTAL FREEDOM
18 OCTOBER — 5 NOVEMBER, 2022

“Without [art], I wouldn’t feel quite alive, or I wouldn’t feel like I should be living without doing some work. You could say it’s a sense of responsibility. It’s the proof that I am alive.”
Toko Shinoda, 2017

Kamal Bakhshi Modern Asian Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by the late Japanese artist Toko Shinoda (1913–2021) organized in conjunction with William Davie.
The paintings on view are drawn from the period that spans Shinoda’s return to Tokyo from New York in 1958 up until her death in 2021. Throughout this extensive period Shinoda came to fully harness and explore the possibilities of two determining artistic points in her life.

The first was her regimented schooling in calligraphy. This began in earnest at the age of 6 with rinsho, a tradition that traces its lineage back 3000 years to China whereby the student copies the works of masters. Yet even at a young age Shinoda innately knew that in order to formulate her own visual language she would have to break free from the historical and hierarchical constraints inherent to calligraphy.

“It has been my personality since I was little. I could imitate the models, but it was not really enjoyable. It is, after all, fake-making. My teacher praised me for making fakes. If it looked exactly like the model she praised it. I felt that was very strange, even as a child.” Toko Shinoda, 2015.

The second was the two-year period Shinoda spent in North America. Here, Shinoda’s works to date achieved critical and commercial success that she would leverage upon her return to Japan. However, it was her exposure to the works of the abstract expressionists, many of whom she would meet, that proved so formative. Their autonomy over painterly expression that boldly pronounced their freedom from the history and traditions of western painting was essential in how Shinoda envisioned her work evolving.

“As an art form of the perceptions, abstract would have to be the purest. Call it the power to aid, to guide perhaps, the workings of the human heart... “Calligraphy” on the other hand, used in the writing of literature, is limited solely to a certain single realm. Neither is superior or inferior to the other, both are important types of work within me, there being two things within me.” Toko Shinoda, 2012.

In the years before and immediately following the end of the Pacific War Shinoda garnered some critical and commercial success in Japan while remaining on the periphery of a wider male-dominated modernist calligraphic movement that fused calligraphy and abstraction. Yet an air of contention persists in these works as the two styles vie for prominence.

Upon her return to Japan, in the spirit of the abstract expressionists, she gave herself permission to be the artist that she wanted to be and to create the works that she wanted to, ushering in an artistic sea change. At the root of this sea change and what characterizes the paintings on view at Kamal Bakhshi Modern Asian Art are the scope with which Shinoda’s fusion of calligraphy and abstraction is harmoniously distilled and entwined like the grooves left on an ice rink after a figure skater’s performance.

Shinoda’s compositions often appear both complex and deceptively simple owing in large part to her use of sumi. Sumi is a solid ink that produces a black ink widely used in calligraphy for centuries that is made from soot pressed into sticks. The sticks are then rubbed on a wet stone to release the pigment that can also be diluted, known as sumi-e, with extraordinary range, creating spectacularly ephemeral results. Shinoda uses sumi as a base on which to incorporate flares of cinnabar, an equally storied pigment that produces a richly enchanting array of vermillion as well as gold-and-silver leaf paint and other select colours.

In Flight we see a masterful example of Shinoda’s interplay between diluted and undiluted sumi as well as her exquisite brush control and excellent command of negative space. The darker undiluted swathe is applied vertically and at an angle with a hint of vigour glimpsing towards the gestural mark making inherent to many of the abstract expressionists while the lighter diluted swathe that haloes it is crisp; its applied pressure and weight perfectly executed. The elegant drama evoked between these the two aesthetics is then complicated by an intricate and svelte calligraphic motif rendered in gold-leaf horizontally over the top of them that further demonstrates Shinoda’s ability to create such symphonic complexity with so little visual stimulus.

In Equality the silver-leaf vertical gestures that driving upwards on the left half of the composition and vermillion on the right half display a different approach to the distillation of movement and gradation that defines much of Shinoda’s mature works. The tonal range seen within the vermillion strokes in particular, their staccato cadence that both enhances the overall form of the gestures but crucially offsets it as well, shares a great deal visually with Kline’s nuanced layering of sweeping black brushwork.