MIYA ANDO

Ando lived her formative years between a Buddhist temple in Japan and the mountains of Northern California. The unique vantage point expressed inKumoji (Cloud Path / A Road Traversed By Birds AndThe Moon) reflects her experiences as an artist occupying the margins between Japanese and Westernculture.

Ando's circular night cloud paintings read like memories—never static, fluctuating endlessly depending on the position of the viewer and the available light. Basedon actual night clouds Ando photographed in a varietyof locations over the past three years, their ephemeralqualities illustrate the sentiment behind the Japanesephrase 'mono no aware,' roughly translated as 'thepathos of things.' Beauty fades; strength dissolves intofrailty. Everything follows this rule; it is the vernacular of nature.

'Something becomes more beautiful and sublime the more impermanent it is,' Ando says. 'There's a psychological shift that occurs when one recognises thepathos of falling cherry blossoms, or the moon goingthrough phases, or a passing cloud.'

Kuu, a large-scale, three-panel painting made from reclaimed redwood and silver nitrate, borrows its namefrom a Japanese word of particular importance toBuddhism, which holds multiple meanings, includingsky, void, and emptiness. To create this work, Ando firstcharred the redwood using a traditional Japanese fireproofing technique called shou sugi ban which requiresburning the surface to protect the inner layers of woodfrom future damage.

'I char the wood because it dematerialises the object,' she says. 'The silver nitrate creates a mirror. Itbecomes like water. A reflection is there and not there;it is material and immaterial.'

The overlap of emptiness and substance is further elucidated in Mizukagami (Water Mirror, or The Shadow Of The Moon Reflected In Water), a hammered steel floorsculpture that evokes the fugitive phenomenon of themoon reflecting on the surface of a pond. Like so manyof Ando's paintings, and like the moon itself, this sculpture seems to emit light despite lacking any source ofillumination—a momentary articulation of both presence and absence.

'When you see the moon you see the light of the sun,' Ando says. 'That reflected light is reflected again whenyou see the moon on water.'

Most ephemeral, perhaps, of all of the bodies of work featured in Kumoji (Cloud Path / A Road Traversed ByBirds And The Moon) is Ando's new series of paintingsdepicting stars, rain, and the phases of the moon, made with natural indigo dye and pure silver powder on mulberry paper. As Ando notes, 'Indigo is like a littleclock of colouration. The longer it touches a surface, thedeeper and darker blue the surface becomes.'

Like the temporary carriers of yesterday's light they depict, these paintings memorialise and measure thatmost fleeting of natural phenomena—the passage oftime.

Ando's work has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Asia Society Museum, Houston; TheNoguchi Museum, New York; Savannah College Of Artand Design Museum, Savannah; The Nassau CountyMuseum, Roslyn Harbor; and The American UniversityMuseum, Washington DC. Her work has also beenincluded in recent group exhibitions at The CrystalBridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The LosAngeles County Museum of Art; The Haus Der Kunst,Munich; The Bronx Museum; and The Queens Museumof Art, NY. Ando's work is included in the public collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA);The Nassau County Museum, NY; The Detroit Instituteof Arts, MI; The Luft Museum, Amberg, Germany;Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Scottsdale Museum ofContemporary Art, AZ; The Santa Barbara Museumof Art, CA; Jean Paul Najar Foundation MuseumCollection, Dubai UAE; and The Museum of Art andHistory, Lancaster, CA; among many other public andprivate collections. Among Ando's many acclaimedpublic commissions is 9/11 MEMORIAL (SEPTEMBER11 MEMORIAL), a thirty-foot-tall sculpture built fromWorld Trade Center steel installed in Queen ElizabethOlympic Park, Zaha Hadid Aquatic Centre, London, UK.Ando holds a bachelor's degree in East Asian Studiesfrom the University of California, Berkeley, studiedEast Asian Studies at Yale University and StanfordUniversity, and apprenticed with a Master Metalsmithin Japan.