Change

Change is a print by Toko Shinoda, the long-lived and internationally celebrated Japanese artist whose abstract calligraphic prints are among the most recognizable contributions of twentieth-century Japan to international modernism. Born in Manchuria in 1913 and resident in Tokyo from infancy, Shinoda trained in classical calligraphy from childhood and exhibited her first works in the 1940s, but she made her decisive turn toward abstraction after moving to the United States in 1956, where her exposure to Abstract Expressionism reinforced her commitment to gestural composition while she continued to work primarily in [sumi](/glossary/sumi) ink on paper. From the 1960s she developed a sustained practice of lithography in which characters and ink-strokes were translated into editioned prints, often with the addition of gold and silver leaf or hand-drawn red lines that transformed the lithographic surface into something close to a unique work. The title Change names a fundamental category in her vocabulary and indeed in the broader East Asian aesthetic tradition, where transformation, impermanence, and the slow conversion of one state into another are central preoccupations of poetry and brush practice. Shinoda's compositions under this title typically arrange a few decisive ink-stroke gestures across a quiet ground, leaving substantial blank paper to register as compositional silence. The print is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/toko-shinoda-xiao-tian-tao-hong-change), which preserves a record of the design under Toko Shinoda's name. No museum acquisition is recorded in the working brief, and the print is therefore catalogued here from the secondary-market listing and the artist's known practice in calligraphic abstraction across the second half of the twentieth century.