Miya Ando is an American artist whose painting and sculpture articulate themes of perception and examine one’s relationship to time. Ando is a descendant of Bizen sword makers and spent her childhood between a Buddhist temple in Japan as well as in rural Northern California. Her work pays homage to ancient techniques and ideas, fusing them with contemporary materials and forms. She often references historic Japanese literary texts and examines the idea that the fundamental nature of reality is that all constituent forms that make up the universe are temporary; a concept found in Buddhism as well as Quantum physics.
Ando’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions internationally at leading institutions including The Asia Society Museum (Houston), The Noguchi Museum (New York), SCAD Museum (Savannah College of Art and Design), Savannah, GA; The Nassau County Museum (New York) and The American University Museum (Washington DC). Her work has also been included in extensive group exhibitions at institutions including The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; The Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Bronx Museum, New York, NY and Queens Museum of Art, New York, NY. Her work is included in the public collections of LACMA, The Nassau County Museum (New York), The Corning Museum of Glass (New York) and The Detroit Institute of Art Museum (DIA), The Luft Museum (Germany) as well as in numerous private collections. Ando has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award and commission for The Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, CT. She exhibited her work in Frontiers Reimagined during the 56th Venice Biennale.
Miya Ando, Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form Exhibition, 2019-2020, Asia Society Texas Center
Miya Ando Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form Exhibition
Curated by Bridget Bray, Asia Society Texas Center
“The Heart Sutra is a succinct text widely recited by Mahayana Buddhists as a part of their spiritual practice. This exhibition’s title Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form is an axial line in the Buddhist text, challenging readers to collapse dualistic thinking about the nature of reality. The artist Miya Ando draws from this source in her response to the unique architecture of Asia Society Texas, and her installations here engage with their surroundings through the use of elemental materials such as metal, light, water, and wood. Ando, as a bilingual and bicultural artist (Japan and the U.S.), is perhaps uniquely situated to address the non-duality encapsulated in the Heart Sutra.”
Miya Ando, Kumo Cloud 6, 2017, Ink on Aluminum Composite, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Miya Ando Atmosphere in Japanese Painting Exhibition
Curated by Hollis Goodall, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
In the Japanese language, there are about 50 words for rain, but also an equivalent surfeit of terms for snow, mist, and fog. In winter, Japan’s weather is dominated by a cold air mass from Siberia, which transfers moisture from the ocean, bringing heavy snow to the Japan Alps and lighter snow elsewhere. Summer brings tropical rain and humidity from the southeast over all the islands of Japan except Hokkaido in the north. The result is that atmosphere is often associated with water, whether heat with heavy humidity, mist, rain, snow, or torrents of water as rivers, which provide a respite from stifling temperatures in summer.
Relatively simple painting tools are available to the Japanese artist—paper (washi), ink (sumi), water-based or mineral pigments, which, in formal situations, are applied to silk. Only the most skilled artists can convey the rush of water, rising mist or humidity, the chill of a frosty winter evening, and snow laced decoratively through an environment.
Atmosphere in Japanese Painting, presents a span of techniques for evoking atmosphere… Three new acquisitions are [featured including] Cloud 6 (Kumo) by Miya Ando (United States, born 1978).
Miya Ando, Clouds Exhibition, 2018, Solid Glass Sculptures, Noguchi Museum, New York
Miya Ando Clouds Exhibition
Essay by Dakin Hart, Senior Curator, The Noguchi Museum, New York
Isamu Noguchi appreciated ephemerality: spatial, corporeal, temporal. Because he tended to think in geologic time and cosmic terms, he also had an unusually keen understanding of the extent to which everything on Earth and in heaven exists in a transitional state. He tried frequently, in many different words and ways—with great eloquence but equally great difficulty—to explain that for him sculpture existed most meaningfully in the invisible forces and ties that connect objects, people, and structures.
His conceptual flexibility and antipathy to narrow prescriptions of what could constitute a sculptural object led him to air, light, voids, bodies in motion, liquid water, water vapor, clothing, optics, sound, and other transient illusions and embodiments of time and space—all of which he started working with and thinking about in the 1920s. From the start, his conception of sculpture, his model and competition, was, simply, Nature (the whole thing!). And as a result he considered the ephemeral not just the legitimate domain of sculpture but at the heart of its mission to shape public space, public life, and human consciousness—as do more palpable sublimities such as rain storms, sunrises, cloud-wreathed mountains, and the feel of grass, stone, and sand under your feet. So motivated was he to capture the transience of human perspective that he spent the last two decades of his life trying to turn solid stone into something as plastic and lissome as water. It also inspired the development of Akari—his almost rainforest-diverse ecosystem of organic and inorganic collapsible paper lanterns designed to give electricity the life-affirming presence of fire and sunlight.
Akari was not Noguchi’s only foray in collapsible sculpture. Building on his elementary-school education in kirigami and origami (cut and folded paper), he was fairly obsessed with making three-dimensional sculpture from two-dimensional materials (e.g. sheet metal, sheets of stone, and plywood). Within months of his first modeling lesson he had become expert at shaping masses through addition and subtraction in clay. But it’s the planar constructions of the Russian constructivists—the tumbling, intersecting planes of color and light in a void found in László Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky’s paintings and prints—that really fired his imagination. His first great commission, a 1939 table of indeterminate use for A. Conger Goodyear, then President of the Board of Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art, is composed of a handmade, stack-laminate, rosewood base and an industrial plate-glass top. This marvel of industrial design turned to the purposes of domestic craft was preceded and followed by many bodies of work in sheet metal, plywood, and stone cladding that look to coachbuilding, architecture, and set design for their spatial frames of reference, but have as their general organizing principle a weightlessness-seeking openness to space. All are examples of Noguchi’s mission to construct tangible feelings from materials that are, or seem like, nothing.
It is with a thought to this history that we asked Miya Ando to consider pushing her glass cloud series—fabricated by a somewhat bemused industrial glass company in Germany—in an environmental direction. She took as a touchstone for the work, which introduces clouds to the rock garden of the Museum’s indoor-outdoor galleries, this poetic zengo (Zen phrase):
Seizan moto fudo
Haku un onozukara koraisu
Blue mountain does not move.
White cloud comes and goes naturally.
The resultant mysterious, virtually Instagram-proof objects conjure an illusion of the enveloping ephemerality of clouds, among the least-corporeal objects associated with Earth, in actual spaces as flat as a microscope sample slide. In Area 1, they make an ideal, conceptually diaphanous, expanding and collapsing counterpoint to the Museum’s occupation this year by galaxies of Noguchi’s Akari. For the very considerable size and weight of the glass substrates in which they are suspended, overall Ando’s clouds aren’t much more palpably substantial, from most angles, than the song of the sparrows that roost in the bamboo grove in the Museum’s garden. Viewed end-on they are virtually invisible, taking ambiguous shape in ambivalent space only as one walks around them: but never emerging so completely as to be truly grasped. It’s a lovely, sophisticated visual analogy for the techniques of borrowed landscape and hide-and- reveal that Japanese garden designers use to create and manage the perception of scale in space.
Try to bring to mind, or phone, that famous first picture of Earth from space taken from Apollo 17 that has become known as “The Blue Marble.” The first thing you notice about our planet is how round it seems set against the void, and how much raw material its appearance in space offers the great painters’ debates about whether objects in the world have edges and if so what kind and how to render them. From space, Earth is so pure it seems almost a platonic ideal of itself. The second thing is the diaphanous swaddle of clouds. Their appearance, the way they seem to form the Earth more than float around it, is what led to that metaphor, which the photograph made axiomatic, of our planet as a sphere of swirling patterned glass. Ando’s Clouds combine these two complex concepts: sculptural formlessness and the manipulation of the illusion of time and space in a planar form, in a way that Noguchi would have greatly admired for its enigmatic, ungraspable, suggestive simplicity: at once so much like and unlike clouds themselves.
Miya Ando, Clouds Exhibition, 2018, Solid Glass Sculptures, Noguchi Museum, New York
Miya Ando, Kō 72 Seasons, 2019, Pigment and Urethane on Aluminum, 48 x 216 Inches
Miya Ando 72 Kō Seasons Exhibition
“The centerpiece of my 72 Kō Seasons exhibition—and the inspiration for the show’s title—is a vibrantly colorful, large-scale installation comprising 72 small, light-reflecting metal paintings arranged in a chronological grid. A meditation on temporality and transition, 72 Kō Seasons is a visual expression of the Japanese calendar system (by way of China), in which there are 24 seasons that are further segmented into 72 seasons per year, with each season paying homage to nature’s fleeting beauty and the passage of time.
I’m investigating this as a practice of acute awareness to time via minute and subtle observations of nature. I’m incorporating transitions into the lexicon as I examine a much more detailed time system than our traditional four seasons. In breaking down the familiar structure of time, I draw awareness to seasonal shifts in weather, temperature, light and natural phenomena, which she articulates through form and color.” -Miya Ando
Miya Ando, 銀河 Ginga (Silver River), 2019, Steel and Fabric, 10 x 3.5 x 200 Feet
Miya Ando 銀河 Ginga (Silver River) Large-Scale Installation
Jessica Wilcox, Director of Exhibitions, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York
Meandering through the park, Miya Ando’s textile banner Ginga (Silver River) embodies the Japanese word for galaxy, reflecting the relationship between the natural and human imagined ordering of the world. The piece connects two phenomena associated with time: the flowing water of a river and the movement of the stars. Ginga also suggests the myth that inspires the Japanese summer Star Festival, Tanabata. In the legend, the Sky King, is angered by his daughter, the Weaver Princess, neglecting her weaving while distracted by her beau, the Cow Herder. In reaction, the Sky King separates the lovers, putting the Silver River (the Milky Way) between them. The rainy season’s storms signify her tears. The sympathetic magpies build a bridge across the sky allowing the lovers (represented by the stars Vega and Altair) to reunite once a year. This day on the 7th day of the 7th month is known throughout Japan as the day wishes come true. The festival marks this meeting, and Ando’s shimmering textile celebrates this celestial journey and tracking of seasons.
Miya Ando, Four Seasons Kimonos, 2018-2019, Dye, Water, Anodized Aluminum, Steel
72 x 192 inches Four Kimonos, 72 x 48 Inches Each
Miya Ando Four Seasons Kimonos
“I created these Furisode (Long Sleeve Style) kimonos as a replica of a silk kimono that my Japanese grandmother sewed for me. The Furisode style of kimono is only worn by unmarried women, after one is married the custom is to wear short sleeves. I used the kimono that my grandmother made for me as a pattern and constructed the piece with dyed, anodized aluminum squares and steel rings. I used an electrochemical process of coating the aluminum squares with an aluminum oxide (called Corundu, The gemstone sapphire is comprised of corundum, ruby is the red form of corundum.) Coruncum is a mineral known for its extreme hardness, it is the second hardest naturally occurring substance after diamonds, it’s rating is 9 on the Mohs scale. The four seasons kimonos are inspired by Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter.” -Miya Ando
Miya Ando, Waves Becoming Light Exhibition, 2019, Cornell Art Museum, New York
Miya Ando Waves Becoming Light Exhibition
Curated by Melanie Johanson, Cornell Art Museum, New York
Miya Ando creates an immersive environment for her solo exhibition at The Cornell Museum of Art. Included is a large-scale, diaphanous installation of suspended silk fabric inspired by a quote by Zen Monk Eisei Dõgen “[Being illuminated by] the moon dwelling in the quiet mind, even the waves are breaking down and becoming light.” She will also be exhibiting three paintings, New Moon and Full Moon (23k gold, pigment, mica, resin, stainless steel) and Sui Getsu (Water Moon), ink on aluminum composite.
Miya Ando, Sora Versailles, 2018, Versailles Hotel, Miami Beach
Miya Ando Sora Versailles Large-Scale Installation, Versailles Hotel, Miami Beach
Commissioned by Faena Art for Art Basel Miami
This large-scale installation, commissioned by Faena Art for Art Basel Miami 2018, examines perception, as the historic Versailles Building is transformed into the sky itself, becoming void-like or transparent. The installation investigates one’s relationship to time as sunset and sunrise are depicted on the four sides of the building.
The Japanese kanji 空 is pronounced “Sora” and means sky or heaven. This word also has another reading, pronounced “kū” and means “emptiness or void”. Void is one of the five elements (earth, water, fire, wind, void). “Sora Versailles” installation is inspired by the idea of both sky and emptiness. In Buddhism as well as in Quantum Physics, the fundamental nature of reality is that all constituent forms that make up the universe are temporary, a concept termed ‘Sunyata.’ Artist Miya Ando pays homage to the building’s original architect Roy France’s design philosophy of “let in the air and sun” as she wraps one of Miami’s most iconic buildings in clouds.
Miya Ando, Cloud Field Exhibition, 2018, The Katzen Arts Center,
American University Museum, Washington, D.C.
Miya Ando Cloud Field Exhibition
Curated by Aria Gannon, The Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C.
In her Cloud Field exhibition Miya Ando’s artwork ranges from monochrome to subtle color palates, offering a glimpse of the immense calming energy of the infinite. Ando creates an immersive work that engages the viewers, bringing nature to mind, reminding the viewers of their own connection to, and place within, nature and nature’s cycles. Her works bring attention to the fragility, the deep power and the uncompromising force of nature via experiential art installations which create environments of reflection and wonder. Distinctive in her highly adept presentation of subtle realities, Ando’s work has given her an international reputation as one of the most innovative working artists.
Miya Ando Cloud Field Exhibition Review in The Washington Post
“Asia shapes two art shows at the AU Museum” by Mark Jenkins, April, 2018
…Miya Ando was born in Los Angeles to a Japanese mother and an American father of Russian Jewish heritage… Ando, who now has a studio in New York, spent part of her childhood at the Buddhist temple her grandfather oversaw in Okayama, midway between Osaka and Hiroshima. And all the pieces in her AU show — and the show itself, “Kumo” — are titled in Japanese.
“Kumo” means cloud, and much of the artist’s minimalist work depicts transient
atmospheric phenomena. Ando may contemplate the sky merely for its subtle beauty.
But ephemeral mist and light might also represent Buddhist teachings about eternal
change and life’s impermanence.
Unlike some artists influenced by Buddhism, Ando doesn’t work with materials that are
themselves fragile or fleeting. The cloudlike forms of “Kumo” are etched by laser into
large blocks of optical glass, placed here in front of black backdrops that both set off
and reflect the wispy images. Some of Ando’s more painting-like works are made with
metallic pigments and other industrial substances on wood, steel or aluminum panels.
The imagery is soft, and colors shift among silver, gold, red and gray as the viewer’s
perspective changes. But the pieces themselves are hard-edged.
There’s a Japanese reason for that, too. The artist is a distant descendant of one of the
samurai-swordsmiths for which the Okayama area was known in centuries past.
But Ando’s sleek, glimmering surfaces also suggest something recent and closer to her
birthplace: the work of California’s “finish fetish” artists, who were inspired by the
shapes and shines of surfboards and sports cars.
This isn’t an affinity the artist just happened to develop while living in L.A. Her father
had a garage where he sanded and welded car parts. “I loved metal shops. I felt
comfortable around muscle cars,” recalled Ando in a 2011 interview with a Buddhist
publication.
That’s the American chassis of Ando’s starkly lovely depictions of dawn, dusk and
clouds. The artworks are named in Japanese and Buddhist-inspired, but there’s a little
vroom vroom in them as well.
Miya Ando, Aurorae, 2019, Painted Fabric, Aluminum, 138 x 120 x 120 Inches
Solid Glass Sculptures, Energy Exhibition at Nassau County Museum of Art, New York
Miya Ando Energy Exhibition
“Enter the Aurora” by Charles Riley, Curator Nassau County Museum of Art
Miya Ando is not just an extraordinarily talented sculptor and painter, the creator of ravishingly beautiful works including four that we displayed in True Colors, but
she is also a wide-ranging scientific thinker. When she mentioned she was thinking of a major new series based on the aurora borealis, the plan for this extraordinary work, commissioned for our exhibition, was set in motion. Her knowledge of materials as well as physics is deep enough for her to publish articles on metallurgy in professional journals, while her burgeoning career as a sculptor has led to major solo shows and commissions at the Noguchi Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Crystal Bridges, LA international airport, Singapore, Tokyo, Miami is making her a star. Her theme, the Northern Lights, is a sublime display of nature’s energy that lures bewitched travelers to remote locations where they chase the spectral emissions, the result of collisions between the gaseous particles of earth’s atmosphere and the electrons accelerated in their passage from the magnetosphere of the sun. The electrons transfer their energy to the atmosphere, exciting molecules to higher energy states, after which they release their energy in the form of light. The emerald green is produced by oxygen about 60 miles high, while the red is at 200 miles, while nitrogen produces blue or purple. The very idea of attempting to harness this evanescent and wondrous phenomena and bring it inside a gallery is as amazing as it is audacious.
Miya Ando, Aurorae, 2019 (Detail View), Painted Fabric, Aluminum, 138 x 120 x 120 Inches
Miya Ando, Emptiness the Sky (Shou Sugi Ban), 2015, Charred Wood,
Metal Paintings (Urethane, Pigment, Aluminum) 96 x 96 x 96 Inches
Miya Ando Emptiness the Sky (Shou Sugi Ban)
Large-Scale Installation for Frontiers Reimagined at the 56th Venice Biennale
“This installation was created for Frontiers Reimagined for the 56th Venice Biennale. I utilized a traditional Japanese exterior architectural cladding of charred wood. Inside are paintings on metal. The piece was inspired by the Japanese Buddhist word ‘Kuu,’ which means both ‘Empty’ as well as ‘Sky.” -Miya Ando
Miya Ando, Ascension Leaves, 2015, Bodhi Sekeleton Leaves, Dye, Quartz Crystal, 180 x 108 Inches
The Montefiore Hospital Lobby, New York
Miya Ando Ascension Leaves Large-Scale Permanent Installation
Jodi Moise, Curator of The Montefiore Fine Art Program and Collection, New York
Miya Ando created this installation, commissioned by The Montefiore Fine Art Program and Collection, and permanently installed in The Montefiore Hospital Lobby, out of thousands of hand dyed Bodhi (Ficus Religiosa) Skeleton Leaves sewn into long strands. Ando’s sought to create a piece that moved softly when people walked by or when the doors of the hospital opened and closed, bringing nature inside the lobby of the hospital. She was interested in investigating perception and one’s relationship to time. She used a time-based dyeing system for the leaves, and left the darker colored leaves in the dye for longer periods of time so there is a trace of the process. The leaves are all dyed with the same color, the gradient within the piece is created by the time the leaves spent in the dye. She uses the real leaves in her work, the idea that leaves fall in autumn and emerge again every spring is profound to me in that it is a metaphor for continuum as well as for the ephemerality of all things. The Bodhi (Ficus Religiosa) Tree is very special, it’s the species of tree under which The Buddha gained enlightenment and speaks to transcendence and transformation. The configuration of the leaves in concentric circles is inspired by systems of nature and the idea that all things are interconnected.
Miya Ando, Obon (Puerto Rico), 2012, Bodhi Skeleton Leaves, Phosphorescence, Resin,
1200 x 1200 Inches (Variable)
Miya Ando Obon (Puerto Rico) Site-Specific Series
Fist Art Foundation, Puerto Rico
Adele Chong of Surface Magazine writes, “Obon, a site-specific series that pays homage to the ancient Japanese ceremony of the same name. A annual ritual of remembrance, descendants of visiting spirits guide their deceased ancestors back to the netherworld by floating small paper boats containing lit candles. Ando initiated the latest edition last year, in collaboration with the Fist Art Foundation in Puerto Rico. Consisting of a thousand Bodhi leaf skeletons, each fragile entity was painstakingly hand-painted with phosphorescence and resin, and cast afloat on a pond. The leaves absorbed sunlight during the day, emitting an otherworldly glow later that evening when the showcase opened, allowing the haunting work to achieve a temporal synergy with its physical environment. “I wanted to connect this notion of memory together with the naturally occurring bioluminescence which Puerto Rico is known for,” says Ando.
Miya Ando, 9/11 Memorial Sculpture, 2011, Steel Salvaged from The World Trade Center
336 x 60 x 72 Inches
Miya Ando 9/11 Memorial Sculpture Large-Scale Permanent Installation
Aquatic Centre at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Stadium, London
Miya Ando’s 9/11 Memorial Sculpture is permanently on view in front of Zaha Hadid’s Aquatic Centre at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Stadium, London. The goal was to take a found object from the World Trade Center and honor those who were victimized on September 11, 2001. Ando polished part of the steel to make it a mirror so it would de-materialize and re-direct sunlight into the world.
