MIYA ANDO

Miya Ando’s Ryōanji installation presents an environment in which material, atmosphere, and absence function as equal agents of philosophical inquiry. The work reimagines the dry garden of Ryōanji Temple (龍安寺) in Kyoto—long regarded as one of the most rigorous visual articulations of Zen thought. The historic garden comprises fifteen stones arranged in meticulously raked gravel, forming a spatial composition that resists fixed interpretation and invites sustained contemplation. Its formal restraint and perceptual ambiguity have established it as a touchstone of Japanese aesthetics and Buddhist metaphysics alike.
In Ando’s interpretation, the original stones are distilled into fifteen charred wooden cubes, created using shou sugi ban, a traditional Japanese method of preserving wood through fire. Each surface is treated with silver nitrate, producing subtle variations that register fire, oxidation, and time. By distilling natural stones into minimalist geometric forms, Ando investigates the abstraction already latent in the original garden, drawing attention to the visual and temporal conditions that shape perception.

Ryōanji was exhibited as part of Miya Ando’s solo exhibition Mono no Aware at Saint Laurent Rive Droite Los Angeles.

Moon Ensō (Engessō 円月相) is a site-responsive installation by Miya Ando, commissioned for ART SG Singapore 2025. The work consists of 29 suspended silk chiffon panels, each corresponding to a day in the lunar cycle, forming an immersive spatial environment that explores cyclical time, perception, and material ephemerality. Originating from Ando’s Moon Almanac—a durational drawing practice carried out daily over two and a half years during the COVID-19 pandemic—the project draws conceptually from the Zen symbol of the ensō, a calligraphic circle representing emptiness, continuity, and the non-dual nature of existence. The installation constructs a temporal architecture through light, translucency, and movement, inviting viewers to experience time as an embodied rhythm rather than a fixed chronology.

Moon Meditation Hut (2020) is a site-specific installation by Miya Ando, located at Bhumi Farms in East Hampton, New York. The work reimagines the traditional Japanese chashitsu (tea hut) as an inclusive space for reflection and lunar observation. Constructed from linen panels dyed with natural indigo, the structure also featured phosphorescent paint that absorbed sunlight during the day and emitted a soft glow at night, functioning as a barometer for the amount of daylight received. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, the hut is part of Ando’s Indigo Moon Almanac project, a durational drawing practice in which she documented the moon’s nightly phases beginning with the first lockdown in New York in March 2020 and continuing until 2022, when the governor officially lifted the city’s mask mandate.

Miya Ando’s 銀河 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 title Ginga translates to “silver river” or “galaxy” in Japanese, referencing the Milky Way and drawing from East Asian cosmological traditions, where the galaxy is envisioned as a celestial river flowing across the sky. Spanning 200 feet in length and measuring 10 × 3.5 × 200 feet, the work was composed of printed fabric and stainless steel. The installation formed a circuitous canopy of undulating chiffon, patterned with images of clouds and suspended above the earth. As wind moved through the park, the fabric gently shifted, creating a dynamic, meditative environment where viewers could witness the ever-changing interplay of light, shadow, and movement. Ginga connected two temporal and natural phenomena: the flowing water of a river and the distant movement of stars. These elements served as metaphors for time's passage and the continuity between the terrestrial and the celestial. Installed along the East River shoreline, the work harmonized with its surroundings, encouraging reflection on both planetary and cosmic scales of experience. The installation exemplified Ando’s commitment to creating works that bridge the natural world with human perception—highlighting impermanence, transformation, and the poetic structures through which we understand time and existence.

Waves Becoming Light is an installation composed of suspended silk panels that respond to the subtlest movements of air and light. Drawing inspiration from a line by the 13th-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 delicate wave imagery and suspended vertically in parallel layers, creating a translucent corridor of motion and light. As the panels shift, they cast rippling shadows across the space, forming an ever-changing field of perception. The silk does not depict waves—it behaves like them: undulating, ephemeral, dissolving. The installation suggests the dissolution of form—the transformation of wave into light, motion into stillness.

Miya Ando's Aurorae was a monumental 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 a spiral aluminum structure, measuring approximately 238 x 120 x 120 inches. The installation transformed the gallery into an immersive environment evoking the aurora borealis, as light passed through the fabric and created shifting atmospheric patterns across the space. The result was a meditative, luminous experience that engaged viewers in the intangible beauty of natural phenomena. Aurorae exemplified Ando’s focus on light, transience, and the interplay between the material and immaterial. The work aligned seamlessly with the exhibition’s central theme—energy—by giving visual form to invisible atmospheric forces and evoking the quiet power of auroral motion.
The exhibition Energy: The Power of Art featured a wide-ranging group of artists whose work engaged with scientific and metaphysical ideas. In addition to Ando, the show included works by Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Julie Mehretu, Frank Stella, Joseph Cornell, Man Ray, Richard Pousette-Dart, Barbara Prey, Doug Argue, Rachelle Krieger, Scott McIntire, Keith Sonnier, and Mark Tobey. The museum collaborated with institutions such as Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Tesla Museum, incorporating scientific imagery and even a working cloud chamber to explore themes of radiation, electromagnetism, and the invisible energies that shape life and the cosmos. In this context, Ando’s Aurorae served as a poetic counterpoint—bridging aesthetic contemplation with elemental physics and natural wonder.

Ryōanji is a sculptural installation by Miya Ando, featured in her 2019 solo exhibition Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form, curated by Bridget Bray and presented at Asia Society Texas Center. The exhibition's title references the Heart Sutra, a central text in Mahāyāna Buddhism that teaches the non-duality of form and emptiness—that all things lack fixed essence, and that form and emptiness are not opposites, but mutually dependent expressions of the same reality.

At the heart of the exhibition is Ando’s reimagining of the Ryōanji (龍安寺) rock garden in Kyoto, a canonical work of Zen landscape design. Her installation presents a meticulously scaled replica of the garden, substituting each of the fifteen original stones with blocks of shou sugi ban—wood preserved through traditional Japanese charring techniques. These blackened cubes, each treated with silver nitrate, bear the marks of fire and imperfection, invoking the wabi sabi aesthetic: the quiet beauty found in transience, incompleteness, and irregularity.

By rendering natural stones as minimalist, geometric forms, Ando explores the abstraction inherent in the original garden. Her translation of stone to charred wood invites reflection on material transformation, impermanence, and the meditative void between representation and essence—an echo of the sutra’s teaching: form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.

Miya Ando’s Sora Versailles was a monumental, site-specific installation commissioned for the inaugural Faena Festival in Miami Beach, titled 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. The title, Sora Versailles, uses the Japanese word sora (空), which means “sky” or “emptiness,” invoking a dialogue between natural impermanence and architectural grandeur. By covering the hotel in sky, Ando effectively camouflaged it against its surroundings, dematerializing the building and rendering it a hovering apparition—no longer a monument to permanence, but a mirage suspended in light.

Moonlit Clouds (2018) is a large-scale, site-specific installation by Miya Ando, commissioned as a PROJECTS Special Artist Commission for PULSE Art Fair in Miami Beach. Installed within the entrance pavilion at Indian Beach Park, the work comprised a series of suspended silk panels printed with imagery of night clouds. These translucent banners formed a spatial corridor that moved subtly with the ocean breeze, creating an ephemeral environment shaped by light, shadow, and atmospheric motion. The installation foregrounded perceptual ambiguity and the threshold between visibility and concealment.

WISHING MANDALA (RUBIN MUSEUM) 2017

Miya Ando’s Wishing Mandala (2017) was a participatory installation commissioned by and exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. Composed of dyed Bodhi (Ficus Religiosa) skeleton leaves suspended with monofilament on archival ragboard, the 72 × 72-inch piece invited visitors to engage directly with the artwork. Guests were encouraged to make a wish and place a leaf onto the mandala, fostering a communal space for reflection and intention-setting. The Bodhi leaf, significant in Buddhist tradition as the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment, symbolizes awakening and spiritual insight. By incorporating this element, Ando connected the installation to themes of impermanence and transformation. The interactive nature of the piece emphasized the collective human experience, allowing participants to contribute to the evolving mandala and engage in a shared contemplative practice.

Redwood (Spirit) is an exploration of impermanence, perception, and the interplay between material and atmosphere. The work consists of semi-transparent silk panels printed with photographic images of towering redwood trees—the tallest and among the oldest living organisms on Earth, now diminishing in range and number due to environmental change and human activity. These vertical forms echo both the scale of the trees and the architecture of the space, yet their sheer, weightless surfaces defy solidity, offering a spectral encounter rather than a representational one. The effect is not fixed but spatial and temporal; the viewer moves through its apparition rather than simply observing it.
Ando’s use of silk and diaphanous fabric reinforces her interest in liminal states. The material functions as a threshold between visibility and disappearance, between image and experience. Redwood (Spirit) engages with the spirit of place by rendering landscape not as external terrain but as internal condition.

Meditation Room is a site-specific installation by Miya Ando, created in 2016 at the Nippon Club in New York City to commemorate the victims of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The work invited quiet reflection and remembrance, centering on a sparse yet intimate arrangement: two tatami mats enclosed within translucent walls made from pale pink Bodhi leaves, their cellulose removed to reveal lace-like vascular structures. These suspended leaves softly filtered the ambient light, creating a hushed, contemplative atmosphere within the space. Outside the room’s threshold, two pairs of cast steel geta—one adult-sized and one child-sized—were placed as though recently removed. 

Miya Ando’s 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. This 7-foot (2.1-meter) cubic structure is clad in shou sugi ban, a traditional Japanese technique of charring wood to preserve and strengthen it. The charred exterior evokes a sense of resilience and transformation, reflecting Ando's interest in impermanence and the passage of time. The cube itself is conceived as a contemporary interpretation of a traditional Japanese tea room—a space historically dedicated to quietude, ritual, and the aesthetics of simplicity.
Inside the cube, the space is lined with a series of contiguous paintings that form a continuous horizon line running along all four walls. The unbroken, floating horizon suggests the Buddhist concept of kū (空)—a word that means both “sky” and “emptiness”—transforming the interior into a void-like space. The contrast between the scorched, opaque exterior and the ambient, almost immaterial interior invites stillness and introspection, offering viewers a moment to encounter emptiness not as absence, but as presence—open, boundless, and aware."

Ascension Leaves is a large-scale suspended sculpture by Miya Ando, 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 over 6,500 hand-dyed Bodhi (Ficus religiosa) leaves—the same species of tree beneath which the Buddha attained enlightenment. The leaves have had their cellulose removed, leaving behind delicate, lace-like skeletons. Arranged in concentric circles and suspended on varying lengths of monofilament, they are dyed in a gradient of cerulean blue, with tonal variations determined by the duration of dye immersion. Quartz crystal weights at the bottom of each strand allow the leaves to shift gently in response to ambient air currents, introducing a subtle sense of movement to the space. The sculpture hovers above a circular stairwell and can be experienced from multiple vantage points, both from below and from the upper level. Ando has continued her engagement with healthcare settings through a series of permanent commissions that reflect her interest in creating contemplative spaces for healing and reflection. These include Tides at Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Josie Robertson Surgery Center in New York, Quietness in the non-denominational chapel at San Francisco General Hospital, and a commission for the RCINJ Morris Cancer Center Art Program at Rutgers University.

Kōyō is an installation titled after the Japanese word for the turning of autumn leaves. The work features hundreds of preserved bodhi leaves suspended in vertical strands, each dyed in a shifting sequence from green to gold, crimson, and brown. These colors trace the visible arc of seasonal change, drawn from the natural palette of autumn forests.
The installation draws on momiji-gari (紅葉狩り), the centuries-old Japanese practice of observing the changing leaves. Momiji-gari is a quiet encounter with natural cycles that invites attentiveness and reflection. Rooted in the aesthetic of mono no aware (物の哀れ), it reflects a worldview that embraces the beauty of impermanence.
Inspired by Japanese poetry—especially waka and Heian-era verse—Miya Ando’s Kōyō installation references the literary tradition in which autumn leaves evoke transience, emotional depth, and the passing of time. In Buddhist thought, the falling leaf becomes a metaphor for mujō, or impermanence—the essential condition of existence.The bodhi leaves—lightweight, skeletal, and responsive to air—hover in a suspended field of transition. Color becomes a language of time. The installation offers not a depiction of landscape, but an unfolding experience of change.

Miya Ando’s 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 by 100 feet, the work consisted of 1,000 hand-painted Bodhi leaves (Ficus religiosa), the species of tree under which The Buddha gained enlightenment. Each leaf had its cellulose removed, leaving behind only the vascular structure—the intricate network of veins that forms a lace-like, skeletal pattern. Coated with resin and a non-toxic 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 responded subtly to its environment, acting as a barometer of atmospheric light—on bright days, the leaves absorbed more solar energy and glowed more intensely by night—rendering visible the natural rhythms of illumination and shadow, presence and disappearance.
The project draws inspiration from the Japanese Buddhist festival of Obon, a tradition in which the spirits of ancestors are believed to return home for a brief visit over the course of three days. At the close of the festival, lanterns are floated on bodies of water as a symbolic farewell—guiding the spirits back to the netherworld. Ando reimagined this ritual using luminous skeleton leaves in place of lanterns, merging spiritual tradition with the natural phenomena of Puerto Rico’s bioluminescent ecology. The work offers both a meditation on impermanence and memory, and a quiet commentary on the fragility of these ecosystems. Iterations of this piece have been exhibited in multiple contexts: in Raising the Temperature: Artworks in Environmental Reactions at the Queens Museum of Art in Queens, New York; as part of the Thanatopolis Outdoor Memorial Sculpture program in Norwalk, Connecticut; and in Obon: Temple at the Haein Art Project, Haeinsa Buddhist Temple, South Korea. Each version continues the theme of remembrance through light, scale, and material transformation.

Miya Ando’s 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 and serves as a symbol of peace, tolerance, and resilience.Ando, known for her minimalist artwork that explores impermanence and transformation, polished the steel surface to a mirror-like finish, turning it into 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 contemplative surface that engages with light and the passing of time.The sculpture was unveiled at its permanent site on March 17, 2015. Then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson played a key role in securing the work's final placement. Sir Simon Schama, who also spoke at the unveiling, echoed this sentiment, noting that the sculpture’s reflective surface integrates it into the life of the city, offering a quiet but powerful space for remembrance and continuity.

“So all those memories of unimaginable horror will be present at this place and are embodied in Miya Ando’s extraordinary sculpture—and I also want to pay tribute to Miya and everybody responsible. In an age where contemporary art is very often about, if you are lucky, the quick hit of wit, it is possible also to make great modern and contemporary art which is about something important, something serious, something transforming, and that’s what Miya has done. But she has done it because it is not just a kind of brutally tragic utterance made out of the debris of the World Trade Centre, but there is also as you will see another aspect to the piece which is a reflection, and the reflection is of where we are now, dear friends—of trains travelling past, of the great pulse of the city, the most brilliantly cosmopolitan city in the world… So it is appropriate that we will see the reflection of sky and movement and the life of the people about us.”-Sir Simon Schama

Since 9/11 remains one of the only public 9/11 memorials outside the United States, and stands as a testament not only to the tragedy’s global impact but to the capacity of art to hold memory and mirror the resilience of contemporary life.