Miya Ando’s work is rooted in the intersection of nature and impermanence. Her practice involves philosophical inquiry into time and natural cycles. She constructs visual systems that give form to vanishing conditions such as seasonal transitions, atmospheric change, and the fading of cultural memory. Her materials include indigo, metal, washi, and pigment, each selected for its capacity to reflect the passage of time through visible transformation. Fog, moon phases, and rainfall are approached as temporal systems, made perceptible through sustained observation. Her paintings, sculptures, and installations create visual and temporal environments that heighten attention, drawing focus to subtle transformations and the passage of time. In an era when ecological systems are unstable and digital technologies compress our experience of time, her work proposes a different way of perceiving its passage. Within this framework, disappearance functions as a structural condition.
Materials are chosen for their ability to register temporal and environmental shifts: indigo deepens with exposure, metal oxidizes, and light alters surface. Her multi-medium practice follows from the belief that each concept is best conveyed through the material that most viscerally reiterates its idea. Language functions structurally within her work; titles are drawn from untranslatable Japanese idioms and naming traditions that encode seasonal change, weather, and time. Raised between Northern California and a Buddhist temple in Japan, Ando works from a hybrid perspective, merging Eastern and Western epistemologies.