Toko Shinoda is a Japanese artist known for sumi ink paintings and prints that blend traditional calligraphy with Modern abstraction. Influenced by American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Shinoda’s work is characterized by a loose, gestural style and imagery inspired by the natural world. In the 1960s, she began producing lithographs, which has remained her preferred medium to this day.

When she turned 100 years old in 2013, she declared herself married to her work and continued producing art.

 

Shinoda was born on March 28, 1913 in Manchuria, China and returned to Japan when she was two years old. She was taught calligraphy by her father and had her first exhibition at the age of 20, and since then, her work has been shown in the Hague National Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and other leading institutions around the world. A 1983 interview in Time magazine asserted "her trail-blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso's".