Xanax for the Eyes, Zen for the Soul – Miya Ando’s exhibition
offers a serene antidote to COVID angst
by Richard Speer
I may not have realized how harried, worried, and just plain freaked out the pandemic, economic downturn, and racial/political tensions had made me until I encountered artist Miya Ando’s calming, balming, blood pressure-lowering exhibition, Equanimity (Meditations). Up and viewable by appointment through October 12 at Nancy Toomey Fine Art, the show is Xanax for your eyes, a hot-stone massage for the spirit—serene, restorative, and in these anxiety-inducing mid-summer doldrums, somehow reassuring.
Ando’s mixed-media paintings, all created between 2018 and 2020, exude a hushed quality, a pristine but never antiseptic elegance and contemplativeness that seems firmly within the trajectory of postminimalism, but which the artist views more in the mode of “Zen reductivism.” While the term Zen gets thrown around far too casually by people with little inkling of its history and implications, Ando most decidedly knows whereof she speaks. A practicing Buddhist born in Okayama, Japan, and raised in a temple where her grandfather was head priest, she rises at 3:30 each morning to meditate, aspiring to a state of complete openness and receptivity, which the Japanese call mu. “It’s a place of focused calm and quietude,” she explains. “That’s where I like to reside and dwell.” That sensibility permeates the exhibition.
Immaculately installed in Nancy Toomey’s airy, clean-lined space, the show is visually dominated by a contrast between paintings in traditional square and rectangular formats and a striking suite of tondo (round) pieces, which depict the moon in all its remote placidity. While there are four iterations of this motif, Full Moon captures the orb as it appears when it has just risen over the horizon, yellow-gold, like a miniature sun. Twenty-three-karat gold, embedded within strata of pigment, mica, and resin, imparts the dreamy luster. Another series focuses on cloud imagery, all wisp and fluff and ether floating above earthly troubles, as in NorCal Light and Evening Santa Cruz. Their elemental simplicity owes much to a different Japanese belief system, “the absolutely distilled observation of nature—the reverence and attunement to nature we find in Shinto.” This distillation is quite poetically condensed in a set of limited-edition prints, entitled Unkai (Sea of Clouds), an 8.5 x 11 inch vignette that whispers in silvery washes edging to silky charcoal.
The semi-abstract Peach Yellow, Hakanai (Fleeting), and Red Faint Pink show color fields grading subtly lighter and darker across the picture plane, suggesting liminal changes in the sky as the day begins or ends. Lavender Blue Green Field sings a song of desert sky at twilight. Look at it for a while, and you might start smelling sagebrush and piñon on an evening’s cooling breeze. Spectrum Grid, a grid of twelve panels one foot square apiece, emits an illusionistic, prismatic spray when regarded from changing angles, reminiscent of cloud iridescence or rainbows. This unexpected mutability of hues, which Ando links to Buddhist concepts of transience, results from delicate shifts in chroma and surface, the products of her painstaking technique. Adding up to twenty ultra-thin layers of pigment, urethane, dye, and resin, she often works for months on a single piece to achieve such uncanny luminosities.
The works’ burnished, glowing quality also owes their presentation on aluminum and stainless-steel panels, which lends them shimmer and gleam. In the late 1990s, Ando apprenticed as a metalsmith in Japan, where her direct ancestors, 16 generations back, forged swords in the Bizen Province, a region renowned for metalwork and pottery. It is a happy paradox that the progeny of warlords’ swordsmiths is now deploying metal into contemporary paintings so resolutely peaceful and calmative, yet this is not as big a stretch as it first appears. The Japanese word for equanimity, the artist stresses, “is ‘heijoshin,’ a calmness under duress, a tranquility at all times,” which was a prerequisite for any worthy samurai. “Since they had the responsibility of always carrying around these tremendously dangerous weapons, they had to be unflappable.”
The exhibition’s many contrasts—between straight lines and organic curves, classical geometries and misty sfumato, soft clouds and skyscapes superimposed atop cold, hard metal—complement its deeper integration of retinal pleasure and Zen precepts. The works’ sheer visual charisma is seductive and soothing, yes, but in these acutely angst-ful times, it is the Buddhist reminder of life’s evanescence that reassures us the most. Don’t worry too much in the moment, these paintings seem to say, for this too shall pass.
Richard Speer is a critic and curator whose reviews and essays have appeared in ARTnews, Art Papers, Artpulse, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, and The Chicago Tribune. He is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing (LACMA, Spring 2021) and author of The Space of Effusion: Sam Francis in Japan (Scheidegger & Spiess, September 2020).
