Nature and Impermanence
Miya Ando’s practice is rooted in the intersection of nature and impermanence. She materializes vanishing phenomena—seasons, meteor trails, shifting light, and fragile cultural memory—through metal, pigment, washi, and light. Drawing from Buddhist philosophy and ecological awareness, her work makes transient natural conditions perceptible: fog, moon phases, rainfall, and atmospheric change are translated into form through subtle, elemental abstraction.
Ando’s paintings, sculptures, and installations create visual and temporal environments that heighten perception and slow attention. In an era when ecological systems are unstable and digital technologies compress our experience of time, her work offers conditions for attunement—spaces where slowness, change, and disappearance are held with clarity. Materials are chosen for their ability to register temporal and environmental shifts: indigo deepens with exposure; metal oxidizes; pigment fades; light alters surface.
Language functions structurally within her work. Titles are drawn from untranslatable Japanese idioms and historical color names, whose meanings mutate across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Raised between Northern California and a Buddhist temple in Japan, Ando works from a hybrid perspective, merging Eastern and Western epistemologies.
Ando’s work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Daitoku-ji Temple in Kyoto, and the Jean Paul Najar Foundation in Dubai. She has held solo exhibitions at the Noguchi Museum, Asia Society Texas, the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, the Nassau County Museum of Art, the American University Museum, and participated in group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Haus der Kunst in Munich, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. She exhibited in the 56th Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy. In 2011, Ando created a monumental September 11 memorial sculpture for Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, commissioned from World Trade Center steel. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the 2023 Brookfield Place New York Annual Arts Commission Award, and has lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With a Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (magna cum laude), further studies at Yale University and Stanford University, and apprenticeship under a master metalsmith in Japan, she is also a sixteenth-generation descendant of Bizen swordsmiths. Notable commissions include a 2013 collaboration with Bang & Olufsen, a project for the Philip Johnson Glass House, and a collaboration with Saint Laurent. In 2025, Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words was published by The MIT Press.