森羅万象 (Shinrabanshō)
A forest of countless forms; all things under heaven, understood as one continuous field.
Miya Ando’s work is rooted in the intersection of nature and impermanence. Her practice engages 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.
Central to her work is the Japanese aphorism mono no aware, an attunement to transience and the quiet poignancy of things as they pass. This sensibility informs her understanding of time as something registered rather than depicted, emerging through gradual change and accumulation. Within this framework, disappearance functions as a structural condition.
Her practice is structured around observation over time. Fog, moon phases, and rainfall are approached as durational conditions rather than fixed images. Materials and form are guided by this logic. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, her multi-medium practice follows from the belief that each concept is best conveyed through the material that most viscerally reiterates its idea.
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. Language functions structurally within her practice; 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.