MIYA ANDO

Ando has achieved critical acclaim for her atmospheric paintings and large-scale installations that articulate fleeting natural phenomena. Her practice is rooted in the Japanese philosophical concept mono-no-aware, loosely translated as “an acute awareness of the transience of things,” a bittersweet sentiment often linked to nature and the passage of time.

The artist describes the new series as a means of mapping the sky, recording time, and locating her place in the world through minute observation of the varied tones of the colour blue. At once diaristic and personal, this compendium of paintings also has universal resonance. “In many senses this project functions as an extinction diary,” she says. “I am recording the environment today but maybe some of these colours will disappear. It’s a yearning to preserve and chronicle that.” Amid the threat of climate change, Ando sees the paintings as an invitation to become more attuned to our natural surroundings.

When Ando began observing the sky, she learned that there are a multitude of poetic words for the colour blue in Japanese, but found these words missing from the English lexicon. This inspired her to publish Blue Sky Codex (Aotenjō Nikki), a visual dictionary containing 210 Japanese words for blue translated into English. For each shade, she made a small pastel sketch and a corresponding photograph of the colour found in the sky. The blues listed range from “India Indigo,” a velvety dark blue described as evoking “the deep and unfathomable ocean,” to “Wisteria Mouse,” a lavender-gray shade derived from the image of mouse passing a wisteria flower. Exposing lacunae in the English language, the book elucidates the deep appreciation of nature embedded in Japanese culture. It also formed a conceptual base for the nuanced paintings on view.

Ando’s profound understanding of colour shines through in this ethereal body of work. The paintings range from a triptych that records a pale-blue twilight fading to pink on an autumn day in Tokyo to a summer afternoon in New York where a bright-blue sky is visible through a veil of silvery clouds. Ando uses watercolour-like techniques as well as printing techniques to layer translucent washes of ink and pigment mixed with urethane onto aluminium. Leaving some areas bare, she allows the metal to shine amid passages of colour capturing the mercurial nature of the sky. In some works, she also embeds micronised pure silver, a fine dust-like material, giving the works a luminous quality.

In many senses this compendium of paintings operates as a single, monumental work. Seen collectively, the images immerse viewers in the expansiveness of the sky and invite reflection on nature not only as a precious resource but also as a source of wisdom. “Clouds and the sky may appear ordinary, but they can also be conceptually rich,” says Ando. “They are a vivid reminder of the impermanence and the transience of life, which is the foundation of my practice.”

ABOUT MIYA ANDO

Miya Ando is a Japanese and American artist based in New York City. Her art is rooted in the dialectic coexistence of Eastern and Western cultures through the lens of natural phenomena.

Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York; Corning Museum of Glass, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, California; as well as numerous private collections.

Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at Asia Society Texas, Houston; The Noguchi Museum, New York; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; Nassau County Museum, Roslyn Harbor, New York; American University Museum, Washington, DC; and Bolinas Museum, California. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Bronx Museum and Queens Museum, New York; and Haus der Kunst, Munich.

In fall 2025, MIT Press will publish Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2000 Rain Words. In a similar vein to Ando’s Blue Sky Codex, it is a Japanese-English visual dictionary that compiles 2,000 Japanese words describing rain alongside English translations, and a corresponding indigo and micronized silver drawing on Hahnemühle or washi.

Ando has been the recipient of multiple grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, and has produced several public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture built from World Trade Center steel for Olympic Park in London to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Ando was also commissioned to create artwork for the historic Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. Most recently, Ando received the 2023 Brookfield Place New York Annual Arts Commission. The site-specific commission, titled Flower Atlas Calendar, was on view at the Winter Garden in Brookfield Place in lower Manhattan in July 2023.

The artist has a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley, pursued East Asian studies at Yale University, and apprenticed with a master metalsmith in Japan.