The 66th Mainichi Art Award, announced by The Mainichi Newspapers on New Year’s Day, went to five people including calligrapher Noriko Keitoku. Keitoku’s “Ma: Noriko Keitoku Calligraphy Exhibition” (Seiko House Hall, Tokyo), held last July, was highly praised. Two of her works shown at “Contemporary Calligraphy 2025 New Year Exhibition” this January and elsewhere are now on view in the Mainichi Shodokai show window on the first floor of the Palaceside Building.
Keitoku was born in Tokyo in 1941. She received the Mainichi Calligraphy Commendation (art division) in 2007 and the Sunstar International Award at the Japan Calligraphy Art Institute Exhibition in 2014. She currently serves as counselor of the Mainichi Shodokai and councilor of the All Japan Calligraphy Federation, among other posts. Of the award-winning exhibition it was said: “She showed new possibilities for kana expression. Seen as a whole, including the mounting and not only the characters, the work is extremely fresh—closer to painting or craft than to a kana piece.”
On the exhibition that took on “ma” (interval), Keitoku told the Mainichi: “People have long said that what I write is somehow different from everyone else’s expression. I wondered where the cause lay, and arrived at the idea that it was in the off-beat intervals of the koto I had studied since I was small.”
A video about the award-winning exhibition can be viewed below.
https://shonohiroba.jp/shoka/20240718-1.html