MIYA ANDO Curriculum Vitae :Download
INTRODUCTION
Miya Ando’s practice exists at the intersection of material abstraction, environmental awareness, and the aesthetics of impermanence. Her work contributes to an expanded discourse on post-minimalism, where perception, duration, and natural phenomena are engaged not as subjects to be represented, but as systems to be enacted and embodied. Through painting, drawing, and installation, Ando constructs conditions that recalibrate sensory attention. Her forms—subtle gradients, atmospheric fields, layered transparencies—emerge from a deep engagement with natural rhythms: the movement of fog, the phases of the moon, the mutability of weather and light. These are not metaphors, but structures—compositional decisions that operate within time rather than outside it.
Ando’s work resonates with phenomenological and perception-based practices, balancing monumentality with transience, and scale with subtlety. Her large-scale installations and more intimate works alike reflect a globalized, decentered perspective: not an image of nature as other, but a framework in which perception itself becomes ecological. In this way, her practice intersects with emergent discourses on climate temporality, decolonial aesthetics, and the ethics of attention. Language, too, plays a material role. Many works are titled using untranslated Japanese idioms that describe atmospheric conditions with precision and poetry. These linguistic forms—dense with cultural history and phenomenological insight—act as conceptual anchors. Their untranslatability foregrounds the gap between epistemologies, reminding us that perception is always shaped by language, memory, and positionality.
By privileging nuance over spectacle, Ando’s work offers an invitation to engage with contemporary art’s evolving relationship to the ephemeral, the elemental, and the unseen. It calls not to the image, but to the interval—to the liminal, durational spaces where meaning is sensed before it is known.
BIO
Miya Ando has presented solo exhibitions at The Noguchi Museum (New York), Asia Society Texas (Houston), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah), the American University Museum (Washington, D.C.), and the Bolinas Museum.
Her work was featured in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) in the exhibition Frontiers Reimagined at Palazzo Grimani, and has been included in group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Haus der Kunst (Munich), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Queens Museum. Her work is held in major public collections including LACMA, the Corning Museum of Glass, Detroit Institute of Arts, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, SCAD Museum of Art, Haus der Kunst (Munich), Daitoku-ji Temple (Kyoto), and the Jean Paul Najar Foundation (Dubai). In 2011, Ando created a monumental September 11 memorial sculpture for Olympic Park, commissioned from World Trade Center steel. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and has completed collaborations with Bang & Olufsen and Saint Laurent. In 2025, Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words was published by The MIT Press.