MIYA ANDO

MOON ENSŌ

Moon Ensō (Engessō 円月相) is a site-responsive installation commissioned for ART SG Singapore 2025. Twenty-nine suspended silk chiffon panels correspond to the lunar cycle, creating an environment through which the viewer moves as the phases progress. The work originated from my Moon Almanac, a daily drawing practice sustained over two and a half years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Expanded to architectural scale, the sequence transforms repeated observation of the moon into a spatial experience of time and change. The title refers to the ensō, the circle in Zen calligraphy, and specifically engessō, the “moon circle” associated with the full moon.

MOON MEDITATION HUT

Moon Meditation Hut (2020) is a site-specific installation at Bhumi Farms in East Hampton, New York, reimagining the traditional Japanese chashitsu as a space for lunar observation. Linen panels dyed with natural indigo incorporate phosphorescent paint that absorbs sunlight by day and glows at night, registering changing conditions of light. The work developed from my Indigo Moon Almanac, a daily drawing practice documenting the moon’s phases from the first New York lockdown in March 2020 through 2022.

銀河 GINGA (THE SILVER RIVER IN THE SKY)

Ginga (The Silver River in the Sky) was a monumental outdoor installation commissioned by Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York, for the 2019 exhibition Chronos Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space. The Japanese word ginga means “silver river” or “galaxy,” a name for the Milky Way.

Spanning 200 feet, the installation consisted of printed chiffon and stainless steel, with images of clouds extending across an undulating canopy. Wind moved the fabric while changing daylight altered its translucency and cast shifting patterns of light and shadow. Installed along the East River, Ginga brought together water, clouds, stars, light, and movement as changing measures of time.

WAVES BECOMING LIGHT

Waves Becoming Light is an installation composed of suspended silk panels that respond to subtle movements of air and light. The work draws inspiration from a poem by the thirteenth-century Zen master Eihei Dōgen:

“[Being illuminated by] the moon dwelling in the quiet mind,
even the waves are breaking down and becoming light.”

Each diaphanous panel is printed with wave imagery and suspended vertically in parallel layers, creating a translucent corridor through which the viewer moves. Air moves through the silk like water, while light passes through the shifting layers and casts rippling shadows across the space. The installation changes continuously with the movement of air, light, and the viewer.

AURORAE

Aurorae was an installation featured in the Nassau County Museum of Art’s 2019 exhibition Energy: The Power of Art. Suspended in the museum’s Mrs. Vincent de Roulet Gallery, the work consisted of translucent fabric hanging from an aluminum structure and measured approximately 238 × 120 × 120 inches.

RYŌANJI

Ryōanji reimagines the karesansui garden of Ryōanji Temple in Kyoto, whose fifteen stones are arranged so that they can never all be seen from a single vantage point. I created a precisely scaled version of the garden, replacing the stones with charred wooden cubes made using shō sugi ban. Silver nitrate applied to portions of the surfaces causes the forms to reflect and at times visually dissolve into their surroundings. As the viewer moves, different forms become visible while others recede.

Sora Versailles was a monumental, site-specific installation commissioned for the inaugural Faena Festival in Miami Beach, This Is Not America. The work transformed the exterior of the historic Versailles Hotel by wrapping it in a translucent scrim printed with photographs of the Miami sky at dusk and dawn. Clouds drifted across sheer fabric panels that cloaked the building’s façade, dissolving its solidity into a veil of atmosphere and light.

Moonlit Clouds (2018) is a large-scale, site-specific installation commissioned as a PROJECTS Special Artist Commission for PULSE Art Fair in Miami Beach. Installed in the entrance pavilion at Indian Beach Park, the work consisted of suspended silk panels printed with photographic images of night clouds taken over the Miami coastline. The panels caught passing light and cast moving shadows across the space, creating a translucent corridor that shifted with the ocean air.

The Cathedral is an immersive installation inspired by a natural formation in old-growth redwood forests known as a “cathedral”: a concentric ring of trees surrounding a central, mature “mother” tree. Observed in the Santa Cruz Mountains where Ando once lived, the formation reflects the interdependence of trees within a forest community. Even after the mother tree is severely damaged or dying, the surrounding trees can sustain it through interconnected root systems.

The installation translates this phenomenon into silk chiffon panels, whose translucent quality evokes the fragility and ghostlike presence of old-growth redwoods.

The Wishing Mandala (2017) was a participatory installation commissioned by and exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. Composed of dyed Bodhi leaves suspended with monofilament, the work invited visitors to make a wish and place a leaf onto the mandala, creating an evolving collective work.

The Bodhi leaf, associated with the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment, connects the installation to Buddhist traditions of awakening and transformation.

Redwood (Spirit) consists of semi-transparent silk panels printed with photographic images of towering redwood trees, the largest living organisms on Earth. The vertical forms echo the scale of the trees and the architecture of the space, while their sheer surfaces create a shifting experience of visibility and disappearance. As the viewer moves through the installation, the images become spatial and atmospheric rather than fixed representations

Meditation Room is a site-specific installation created in 2016 at the Nippon Club in New York City to commemorate the victims of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Two tatami mats are enclosed within translucent walls of pale pink Bodhi leaves, with their cellulose removed to reveal lace-like vascular structures. Outside the threshold, two pairs of cast steel geta, one adult-sized and one child-sized, appear as though recently removed.

Emptiness The Sky (Shou Sugi Ban) is a meditative installation presented at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 as part of the Frontiers Reimagined exhibition at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani. The 7-foot cubic structure is clad in shou sugi ban, a traditional Japanese technique of charring wood to preserve and strengthen it. Conceived as a contemporary interpretation of a Japanese tea room, the interior is lined with contiguous paintings forming a continuous horizon line around all four walls.

The unbroken horizon evokes the Buddhist concept of kū (空), meaning both “sky” and “emptiness,” transforming the interior into a void-like space.

Ascension Leaves is a large-scale suspended sculpture installed in 2015 in the atrium lobby of Montefiore Medical Center’s Moses Campus in the Bronx, New York. Commissioned by The Fine Art Program and Collection at Montefiore Einstein, the installation consists of more than 6,500 hand-dyed Bodhi (Ficus religiosa) leaves. The leaves have had their cellulose removed, leaving delicate, lace-like skeletons, and are arranged in concentric circles and suspended on varying lengths of monofilament.

Dyed in a gradient of cerulean blue, the tonal variations are determined by the duration of dye immersion. Quartz crystal weights allow the leaves to shift gently in response to ambient air currents. Suspended above a circular stairwell, the sculpture can be experienced from multiple vantage points.

Kōyō is an installation titled after the Japanese word for the turning of autumn leaves. Hundreds of preserved Bodhi leaves are suspended in vertical strands, each dyed in a sequence from green to gold, crimson, and brown, tracing the changing colors of autumn.

The work draws on momiji gari (紅葉狩り), the centuries-old Japanese practice of observing autumn leaves. The lightweight, skeletal leaves respond to air, while their changing colors create a suspended field of seasonal transition. Color becomes a language of time.

Obon (Puerto Rico) is a large-scale, site-specific installation commissioned by the FIST Art Foundation in 2012 and located in Dorado, Puerto Rico. Spanning 100 × 100 feet, the work consisted of 1,000 hand-painted Bodhi leaves (Ficus religiosa), their cellulose removed to reveal lace-like vascular structures. Coated with resin and a nontoxic phosphorescent pigment, the leaves absorbed sunlight by day and emitted a soft glow by night as they floated on the surface of a pond.

The installation draws inspiration from the Japanese Buddhist festival of Obon, during which lanterns are floated on water as a symbolic farewell to ancestral spirits. Ando reimagined this ritual using luminous skeleton leaves in place of lanterns, connecting the tradition to the bioluminescent ecology of Puerto Rico.

Obon (Puerto Rico) has since been presented in multiple contexts, including the Queens Museum of Art in New York, the Thanatopolis Outdoor Memorial Sculpture program in Norwalk, Connecticut, and the Haein Art Project at Haeinsa Buddhist Temple in South Korea

Since 9/11 is a permanent public memorial sculpture in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, created from a four-ton piece of World Trade Center steel gifted by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Commissioned by the UK educational charity SINCE 9/11, the 28-foot-tall sculpture commemorates the victims of the September 11 attacks. Ando polished the steel surface to a mirror-like finish, creating what she described as a “mirror in the sky.” The column reflects the clouds, sky, and surrounding urban landscape, transforming an object of destruction into a surface that engages with light and the passing of time.