Toko Shinoda was an internationally renowned 20th-century artist and calligrapher. She began her study of calligraphy at age 6. By age 23, she left home to pursue a career in art, supporting herself as a calligraphy teacher. While early dismissal by the calligraphy establishment, the devastation of WWII, and illness stalled her career through the 1940s, in 1947 Shinoda returned to her art with renewed vigor. Over the coming decades, she developed an expressive style extending calligraphic qualities to her abstract explorations. Shinoda expanded her audience beyond Japan during the late 1950s. Successful New York City gallery exhibitions, such as those at Betty Parsons Gallery and Bertha Schaefer Gallery, launched her international popularity, leading to further solo exhibitions in Chicago, Brussels, and Paris. With her bold lines and stark palette, her work offered American and European audiences a fresh perspective on the popular Abstract Expressionism movement.

In the 1960s, Toko Shinoda extended her calligraphic style to the lithographic medium, working with the printer Kihachi Kimura (1934–2014). In their collaboration Shinoda would create her image upon the lithographic plate, Kimura would pull the print, and then Shinoda would lend her characteristic flourishes of color by hand to each printed image. This partnership between artist and printer continued until 2007, when Shinoda turned her attention back to painting. From the 1980s onward, Shinoda enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions within Japan and abroad. In 2013, a four-venue retrospective marked her 100th birthday. Over her career, Toko Shinoda published more than 20 books. In 2016, she appeared on a Japanese postage stamp. Today, her abstract paintings and lithographs can be found in major art collections around the world such as the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.