In the work of Miya Ando, nature serves as form and metaphor for expressing the concepts of impermanence and interdependence. Growing up between two cultures, geographies, and languages–the Redwood forest in Northern California and a Buddhist temple in Japan–Ando makes sculpture, paintings, drawings, and installations that engage duality by merging the manmade with the organic, the material with the immaterial, and Eastern and Western culture. Across her oeuvre, she employs a variety of media–steel, wood, glass, aluminum, washi paper–to poetically articulate the cycles of life and the inexorable passage of time. The results are rigorously researched, materially rich, and conceptually layered objects that mirror the ephemeral nature of their subject—the changing seasons, phases of the moon, shifting clouds, weather patterns, and the stars in the night sky.
Ando’s perception and experience of natural phenomena have become the conceptual and narrative core of her practice. Language, a signifier of cultural values, anchors Ando’s practice and creative inquiry. Over the past two decades the artist has undertaken extensive research of Japanese literature and historical texts, recording and translating thousands of mostly arcane Japanese words that express a philosophy of human existence in relation to nature which she seeks to preserve and translate into visual form. The Japanese idioms Ando integrates in her practice, are poetic and pragmatic descriptions of phenomena associated with the moon, rain, clouds, and other natural elements. For the most part, the Japanese symbols, which generally translate into full sentences in English, embody an immense reverence for the natural world and an acute awareness of humanity’s dependence upon it. Ando provides an approximate English translation of these words in the titles for her artworks, consciously revealing the gap between the two languages and cultures that have informed her identity and point of view.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Miya Ando is a Japanese and American artist based in New York. Her art is rooted in the dialectic coexistence of Eastern and Western cultures through the lens of natural phenomena. Her work is part of many public collections such as: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Luftmuseum, Amberg, Germany; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, as well as in numerous private collections. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Bolinas Museum, Bolinas, CA; the Asia Society Museum, Houston, TX; the Noguchi Museum, New York, NY; Savannah College Of Art and Design Museum, Savannah, GA; the Nassau County Museum, Roslyn Harbor, NY; and The American University Museum, Washington DC. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, LA; Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. and Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY. Ando has been the recipient of several 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, CT. Most recently, Ando received the 2023 Brookfield Place New York Annual Arts Commission and her forthcoming Rain Dictionary is being published by MIT Press. The artist holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, studied East Asian Studies at Yale University and apprenticed with a Master Metalsmith in Japan.