Tochihara was born in North East Liaoning, China and returned to Japan with her family. She graduated from Osaka Shoin University, where she majored in Japanese Literature and later graduated from Musashino Art University in Tokyo. During her career, she entered many art competitions and received many prizes in Japan, including the 2009 Sekisosha-Sho, an honorable prize which is given to only one woman a year from the governor of Hyogo prefecture. She has exhibited her work at galleries and museums extensively throughout Japan, including Kobe and Tokyo. She has also exhibited her work in New York since 1997 when she received a First Look Award at the SOHO Art Festival. Since 2007, she has participated in art fairs and other shows in France, including the ARTENIM, South France International Art Fair and others, including a solo show in Paris in 2008. One of her works was selected as the image for the official flyer and admission tickets in 2008 for the ARTENIM.
She is also enthusiastic about public projects like “Painting 100 Meter Long” at Hankyu Nishinomiya Stadium, Nishinomiya, Japan in 1996 and “Project Rokko” for a painting event organized by Yutaka Sado, Super Kids Project at Rokko Mountain in Hyogo, Japan in 2003. She also worked for “The International Two Dimensional Art Exhibition”, an international artists’ exchange program and exhibition with French artists from The Barbizon at the Asago Art Village Museum in 2008.
Such public events are an important aspect of expressing her art in relationship to society. One primary example is the Pou Art Group over which she presides and which held a huge exhibition of a 480-meter wall painting, showing that Toshiko is a contemporary artist who not only works as an individual artist but also encourages and helps young artists.
Toshiko works in an atelier in an earthy and beautiful mountain in Japan. Using her beautiful environment as inspiration, Toshiko depicts the moment of:
Coldness in the disappearing fog in a very early morning
Or the quietness of the sound when a branch falls to the ground
Or the breath of small animals in the woods
She is impressed with the light of the sunrise and sunset.
She depicts her love of those precious moments by using her own powerful colors.
She picks up paintbrushes to express what she feels about life, plants and animals in the woods. She feels that love and peace are eternal continuations of those precious moments, not just in words or concepts, and, she wants to put those feeling on her canvases. She is never obsequious about anything; her inner strength, gentleness and humble boldness have broadened her world.
As we begin the tenth year of the 21st Century and as we confront natural and economic difficulties of many types, please come and explore the beautiful world of Toshiko’s love and peace.
NY Coo Gallery
Shisano Takeuchi
