A Constellation of Frozen Moments: The Language of Rain
Hollis Goodall

Drawing from the ancient and ongoing history of Japanese poetic and pictorial aesthetics, Miya Ando’s collection of words and paintings bring the quotidian into the realm of the sublime. Freezing ephemeral instants of rain quality— some as a metaphor for human emotion— Ando has treated this single phenomenon of rain like a rope, which unfurled reveals innumerable individuated fibers.

Deeply inspired by her Buddhist-priest grandfather, and tea-practicing grandmother and mother, Ando on a fundamental level absorbed the Pan-Buddhist belief in transitoriness along with the grounding Zen principle of “thusness” (also called “suchness”, or the recognition of things just as they are in the moment). In addition, she learned much from the finely shaded aesthetics of chanoyu (hot water for tea) , and its seasonally differentiated practice that involves the five senses for the enjoyment of the tea, food, flowers, painting and calligraphy, incense, and metal or lacquer utensils in the tearoom; plus the intellect, through planning for the tea ensemble and selecting members of the invited group; and movement of the body, as guests enter the tearoom through a low door after passing through a garden, and follow a set of prescribed movements during the gathering. Tea is a rare practice in that every element in the tearoom and around it holds aesthetic purpose, and each reflects the other in the overall theme of a single meeting. As meetings are never the same, the singular experience had by all in the tearoom is called ichigo ichie— one moment, one meeting— or to treasure the unique moment, a byword for Ando building the dictionary “Water from the Sky”.

Exemplifying the outlook drawn from Buddhist practice and its association with the transitory and ineffable, Roshi Joan Halifax quotes in this volume from Zen Master Eihei Dōgen (Japan, 1200-1253), who, using the example of water, reveals how perception is based entirely on the observer’s situation, and therefore nothing is concretely as it appears to any individual. Contained in Ando’s work is indistinctness that allows for the viewer’s mind to expand the context infinitely and to seek their own defining impression. Dōgen asserted further that all time and that captured within it is momentary, and commensurately it is the fleeting shifts in rain quality that Ando captures in her word definitions and drawings. (1)  The concepts of Zen, including non-duality, transitoriness, and “thusness” (2), entered Japan in the twelfth century with Dōgen and his predecessor Eisai Myōan (Japan, 1141-1215), who had carried Zen teachings from China in 1191. Aesthetics brought with Zen to Japan at that time were reinterpreted through a native lens, emphasizing the evocative rather than the realistic in studies of nature and further describing natural, seasonal elements as subjects for enjoyment rather than calling on them as metaphors for human emotions, as would the court poets from the immediately preceding Heian period (794-1185), noted below. The artistic mainstay from this golden age of the court toward suggestion and inference rather than forthright description seeped into art of the Zen style, even as emotive metaphors from nature faded.

A contemporary of Eisai and Dōgen, who lived initially in the ransacked post-civil war imperial capital, Kyoto, was Kamo no Chōmei (Japan, 1155-1216). After career disappointments and wartime or natural disasters in the capital during his youth, Chōmei became a Buddhist recluse, not yet in the thrall of Zen, but drawn to its emphasis on impermanence (mujō). A quote from the beginning of his essays about living in a ten square foot hut (Hōjōki) reads: 

Though the river's current never fails, the water passing, moment by moment, is never the same. Where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, bursting and disappearing as others rise to replace them, none lasting long. In this world, people and their dwelling places are like that, always changing. (3)

The word hakanai, meaning “fleeting”, or impermanent, stands as a throughline in Ando’s work, and whether she depicts rain, clouds, moonlight, or flowers. Describing the contents of her “Water from the Sky” word list, she claims, “The dictionary makes transitoriness observable and examinable. The terms that relate to seasons bind to one’s own relationship to time. This type of seasonal experience is shared by everyone and everything.” (4) Her choice of materials is alternately reflective or matte, these surfaces playing against one another to alter in varying light. In the rain series, pure silver and graphite engage the reflective role, while the word defined in the dictionary and the corresponding image painted seize the momentary quality of rain, which is ever evolving. In terms of her references to poetry and Buddhist writing, Ando says, “Those things that are fragile or short-lived produce the greatest empathy.” This statement lies in contrast to much philosophy and poetry of the West and links in Ando’s work to the aesthetics of mono no aware —sad beauty— in poetry, impermanence in Zen, as well as sensitivity to seasonal change, and patina of use in tea.

Ando’s mother, mentioned above as a tea master, introduced Ando to Heian literature at an early age. Ando notes early Heian poetry and writing, from The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, The Tale of Genji, and particularly from The Kagero Diary, by Michitsuna no Haha (Japan, c. 935-995), among her favored sources for their pensive beauty and the metaphorical substitution of natural events for human emotions. A quote from Michitsuna no Haha’s poetry in the diary gives a clear instance of emotive references as found in Ando’s dictionary and paintings.

The dew that faded

away is still here on 

these sleeves that dry not,

again this morning—the sky

too cannot help drizzling (5)

Poets of the Heian period, many of them cloistered within palace walls, took note of every detail in their lives, that attention being utmost in The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, who in her notes lists everything in her surroundings that pleases or disgusts her in fine detail. Ando’s familiarity with Sei Shōnagon’s perception of all phenomena, and Ando’s attunement to changes of season passed on to her by her grandmother— who observed in dress and accoutrements the traditional 72 seasons in Japan— brought to her attention the finely differentiated aspects of rain. 

The drinking of powdered green tea (matcha), encouraged by Eisai in the twelfth century for monks to remain alert during meditation, would over the next three centuries be codified into the practice termed chanoyu, that continues to inform much of Japanese culture. The aesthetics that were drawn from Japanese arts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and filtered through the organizing masters of chanoyu, dominating the arts of the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, included concepts of “implication, suggestion, and imperfection” (6) These qualities play a central role in Ando’s work, and are defined succinctly by Japanese aesthetics historian, Yuriko Saito, as, yojō: emotional aftertaste in poetry suggesting lingering emotions (to which Steve Odin adds mono no aware, sad beauty, as a subset) (7); wabi: beauty of poverty in tea; sabi: beauty of loneliness in haiku and ink painting; and yūgen: mystery and depth. (8)

Takeno Jōō (Japan, 1500-1552), merchant, Zen monk, and tea master in the new wabi style of the sixteenth century emphasized these aesthetics, drawing the practice of tea further towards inclusion of wabi and sabi elements. He was the first to employ the term wabi, in relation to the practice of tea in a simple hut using local, rather than imported, utensils. (Terms predating wabi, “chill” and “withered”, indicating spareness, timelessness, and solitude.(9)) Takeno, a linked-verse poet himself, drew related aesthetic features from his knowledge of earlier court poetry, particularly that of the poet-courtier Fujiwara no Teika (aka Fujiwara no Sadaie, Japan, 1162-1241), a contemporary of Zen Master Dōgen. Among Teika’s preferred affects within poetry, one finds sabi and yūgen, as well as ushin, deep feeling. A poem by Teika in the Senzaishū anthology, vol. 6, number 414, c. 1188, is reminiscent in its sensitivity to shades of atmosphere that are found in Ando’s work:

Fallen rain dripping 

From the leaning eaves 

So shallow that 

Swiftly in pours 

The moonlight. (10)

In the second quarter of the fourteenth century, about a hundred years after Teika’s death, Yoshida Kenkō (d. 1350) wrote a literary masterpiece in the form of a diary, entitled “Essays in Idleness” (Tsurezuregusa), c. 1330-1332. In it he extolled patina of age as a feature of the beauty of indistinctness. He explores this theme further in one of the defining phrases of the diary, often quoted by Ando, which reads:

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking at the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring— these are even more deeply moving. (11)

This quote sums up the preference for the hidden, aged, or incomplete, wrapped up in one of Ando’s favorite poetic and pictorial images, oborozuki, or the moon partially masked by clouds, the scene evoking for Ando sad beauty, as it also opens the mind to the infinite possibilities of that which lies beyond the mist. The moon envisioned as obscured and then emerging from mists or clouds in the Buddhist mind brings one closer to the reality of things as they exist: ever-changing.

Those described above are not the only aesthetics that appear in the arts of Japan, as brilliant screen paintings on gold-leafed paper grounds defined the masterpieces of Japanese art from the late sixteenth century, and brightly ornamental works were collected by samurai and commoners up to the modern era, once the fashion for wabi tea slid from preeminence later in the seventeenth century.(12) The aesthetics of wabi, sabi, yojō with mono no aware, and yūgen, remain at the root of Miya Ando’s work, and much that is beloved about the minimalist expression in the arts of Japan. Through her search for the essential character of rain and what gives each rain type its individual identity such that it could be named, Ando’s process appears as if she lost her ego to the rain, a step on the path towards Buddhist enlightenment. Rain is an occluding element that dims from our view surroundings, voices, light, and the moon, and so Ando’s search for specific patterns of rain hints at clarity of thought or perception in what is otherwise a shadowy realm. A contemporary visual artist who can call on both words and thought patterns from the ancient past that explicate a phenomenon one might see outside their window is both unique and moving. With the “Water from the Sky” dictionary and its paintings, she creates an experience of the timeless present.

Endnotes

  1. Raud, Rein. "The Existential Moment: Re-reading Dōgen's theory of time". Philosophy East and West, vol.62 No.2, April 2012, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C5%8Dgen#cite_ref-52 accessed 5-27-24

  2. Described as “the facticity of all things” by Yuriko Saito, “Historical overview of Japanese Aesthetics”. Introduction to New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics, ed. A. Minh Nguyen, Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017, digital book, unpaginated.

  3. https://www.washburn.edu/reference/bridge24/Hojoki.html  accessed 6-4-24. Dwelling places were of particular importance to Chōmei as so many were destroyed in Kyoto at the time, and he did not find a long-term place of residence until he built his portable ten square foot hut.

  4. All quotes from Miya Ando are drawn from a conversation with the author, 5-16-24.

  5. https://www.fulcrum.org/epubs/ww72bd40v?locale=en#/6/22[nav_10]!/4/150/2/2/6/2/1:0, location 112, accessed 6-4-24. See also Lilly Wei essay in this volume and her reference to Tamoto no shigure in Ando’s dictionary and its illustration. Women poets of the Heian period, such as Michitsuna no Haha were first to add native sensibility to this art form after centuries of Chinese influence.

  6. Described as “the facticity of all things” by Yuriko Saito, “Historical overview of Japanese Aesthetics”. Introduction to New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics, ed. A. Minh Nguyen, Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017, digital book, unpaginated.

  7. Odin, Steve. Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics, “Artistic Detachment in Japanese Aesthetics”, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2001, 99.

  8. Saito, Yuriko. “Historical overview of Japanese Aesthetics”. Introduction to New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics, ed. A. Minh Nguyen, Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017, digital book, unpaginated.

  9. Hirota, Dennis. Wind in the Pines: Classic Writings of the Way of Tea as a Buddhist  Path. Kyoto, Ryokoku University and Dennis Hirota, 1995, 43-44. 

  1. (10)  https://www.wakapoetry.net/szs-vi-414/ accessed 6-2-24, translated 2015.

  2. Keene, Donald. Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishers, 1989, p. 115.

  3. (12) A continuum in Japanese painting aesthetics that Ando holds to in the “Water from the Sky” series is that of going beyond lifelikeness, not precisely copying the superficial form of her subject, but evoking the qualities of its natural energies. This aesthetic mandate was put into writing by Tosa Mitsuoki (Japan, 1617-1691) in his Authoritative Summary of the Rules of Japanese Painting (Honchō gahō taiden), who terms proper lifelikeness as following the “laws of life”, and superior artworks that go beyond the lifelike as following the “laws of painting”. See, Makoto Ueda. Literary and Art Theories in Japan. Cleveland, The Press of Western Reserve University, 1967, 130.

PERCEIVING RAIN
Roshi Joan Halifax

a wanderer,

let that be my name—

the first winter rain.

Matsuo Basho

In Zen, an unsui (clouds/water) is one who drifts freely like a cloud and flows unimpeded like water. As the great 8th century Zen Master Shitou Xiqian uttered, “The vast sky does not hinder the white clouds from flying.” And so it is with these images of clouds, rain, and space. One drifts freely through the artist’s years of rain-soaked moments and experiences infinite indigo hues that express the mysterious expressions of rain, rain upon rain, the utter transitoriness of rain, the silence and sound of rain, this evanescent gift of heaven.

The Christian monk Thomas Merton too met rain, again and again, in the thick forest surrounding his isolated hermitage in the dark and soaking Kentucky woods. He wrote:

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night

cherished by this wonderful, unintelligent, perfectly innocent speech

the most comforting speech in the world

the talk that rain makes by itself

over the ridges and watercourses and hollows….

nobody started it

no one is going to stop it

it will talk as long as it wants,

the rain

and as long as it speaks

I will listen.

Miya Ando’s images speak the language of rain, rain expressing the alchemy of change, of creation, preservation, and dissolution. She knows that without rain, there is no life, no earth, no birth, no death, no coming forth, and no decay. Life and death are born out of rain, are born of rain, rain that falls on mountain summits, rain that joins creeks and rivers, rain that disappears into the ink of the night ocean, rain that captures prismatic light, rain that never touches the earth, rain on blossom petals and bent stalks of green rice shoots, rain that washes away salty tears and cleans muddy farm-worked hands. Rain, though lonely, is accompanied by others like itself, and also by clouds, and by wind, thunder, and lightning.

And, as we see from Miya Ando’s images, rain depends on the perceiver. In Zen Master Dogen’s “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” he writes: “Some beings see water as wondrous blossoms, but they do not use blossoms as water. Hungry ghosts see water as raging fire or pus and blood. Dragons see water as a palace or a pavilion. Some beings see water as the seven treasures or a wishgranting jewel. Some beings see water as a forest or a wall. Some see it as the dharma nature of pure liberation, the true human body, or the form of the body and the essence of mind. Human beings see water as water. Water is seen as dead or alive depending on [the seer’s] causes and conditions. … Thus, the views of all beings are not the same. Question this matter now. The thoroughly actualized realm has one thousand kinds and ten thousand ways. …. In this way, water is not just earth, water, fire, wind, space, or consciousness. Water is not blue, yellow, red, white, or black. Water is not forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables, or the objects of mind. But water as earth, water, fire, wind, and space actualizes itself. … Know that even though all things are unbound and not tied to anything, they abide in their own condition. However, when most human beings see water they only see that it flows unceasingly. This is a limited human view; there are actually many kinds of flowing. Water flows on the earth, in the sky, upward, and downward. It flows around a single curve or into many bottomless abysses. When it rises it becomes clouds. When it descends it forms abysses. … The path of water is not noticed by water, but is actualized by water. … Ordinary fools and mediocre people nowadays think that water is always in rivers or oceans, but this is not so. There are rivers and oceans within water. Thus, even where there is not a river or an ocean, there is water. It is just that when water falls down to the ground, it manifests the characteristics of rivers and oceans. … Even in a drop of water innumerable buddha lands appear. … Where buddha ancestors reach, water never fails to reach. Thus, buddha ancestors always take up water and make it their body and mind, make it their thought. … You who study with buddhas should not be limited to human views when you see water. Go further and study water in the buddha way. Study how you view the water used by buddha ancestors. Study whether there is water or no water in the house of buddha ancestors.”

This extraordinary collection of exquisite and ephemeral images is a study of water, a study of rain, a study of the gift of heaven, which gives life to life. You are the perceiver. What do you see?

Miya Ando/ The Blues Project  
Lilly Wei

Miya Ando’s exquisite, poetically titled series, “Water of the Sky,” is an astonishing collection of two thousand images of rain. Each image is accompanied by a title in Japanese with a lyrical translation into English by the artist that describes a particular kind of rainfall. On letter-sized sheets of kozō and Hahnemühle paper that Ando dyed indigo, the drawings range in color from blues so pale that they are almost white to shades that are indistinguishable from black. Installed together, they look like cut-out bits of sky, and summon up a shrine of sorts, a sacralized space steeped in blue light and weather, where you might also hear, in your mind’s ear, the ping and murmur of rain. Needless to say, the pictures are beautiful. 

The drawings might also be viewed as a folio, or a book, the images savored one by one, close-up. Ando wants them to be accessible, their presentation adaptable. Despite the prodigious scale of the project, there is an engaging simplicity and immediacy about them, attributable in part to the venerable means of their creation: ink and graphite on paper. Although adept in diverse media and new technologies, she produced this series by hand for reasons of thematic and historical consistency. 

Ando, raised in an environment that was a propitious, inspiring mix of East and West, has been thinking about this project since 1996 when she was in graduate school. That was when she first realized that there were words in Japanese that had no equivalent in English; that what was deemed noteworthy in Japanese was often not considered memorable in English. Curious, she began to collect and categorize these words, struck by the omissions and intrigued by the implications. Rain became one of these categories after she discovered how remarkably rich the designations and variations for the word in Japanese were. The careful, even microscopic observations of something as recurrent and commonplace as rain were revelatory, picturing the complex, tightly interwoven relationship between Japanese culture and the natural world.

Since then, Ando has prospected for rain words for more than two decades, sifting through Buddhist sutras, the Man’yōshū (the oldest extant collection of poems in classical Japanese), myths, folktales, the poems of Bashō, and innumerable other literary and historical sources, as avidly as any miner digging for gold. (I imagine her exclaiming “eureka” or its most likely more understated counterpart in Japanese when she spots one.) Some are so arcane or dusty with age that their pronunciation has been lost but resurrecting the sound and sense of these words was exciting to Ando, one of the joys of her research, adding one more facet to her project. As her list grew, so did her enthusiasm, fascinated by the words she was discovering. Mukaame, translated as a “fine rain that falls in the spring,” is one such word. Not only is there no similarly comprehensive description of that in a single English word, but no such distillate is possible since English, unlike Japanese, is not a pictorially based language, one significant instance of the divide between the two cultures’ perspectives that influenced their ways of seeing the world. 

“Water of The Sky,” like all of Ando’s work, springs from a deep reverence for nature that is part of her Asian heritage, based on Zen Buddhism and Shintōism, Japan’s indigenous religion, as well as other Eastern philosophies and systems of beliefs.  On another note, there is also a pragmatic aspect compounding the keen national interest in rain. The rate of precipitation is high in Japan, and for much of its past, it has been a country of farmers and fishermen. The preoccupation with rain, consequently, is not only aesthetic and literary, but also empirical and scientific, crucial to survival, hence words like Shukuu (Rain That Has Continued To Fall Since The Night Before) and Kyūu  (Praying For Rain To Fall) with their multiple associations. Today, recording observations of rain and other natural phenomena have only become more critical, as we grapple with climate change and ways to protect the environment from further despoliation. As part of nature, such measures are urgent, essential to our own survival as a species. We exist at the discretion and forbearance of nature, not the reverse, something that Ando understands and acknowledges in her thinking and her work. It is also a conclusion so obvious that it is inconceivable that it is not universally accepted. 

When Ando reached two thousand words, she decided it was an auspicious number to end her project on, although she will continue to add discoveries to her list, still fascinated, the cache of rain words seemingly endless. She then sat down and began to draw, doing almost nothing else for much of the pandemic, completely absorbed in her ambitiously encyclopedic venture. She had the words memorized, so it became a matter of matching them with an image, one that precisely yet poetically mirrored the picture the word evoked, each enriching the other, word and image consummately paired, the chemistry between them high. 

Natural indigo was a material she knew she would include from the project’s inception. It was the “bluest blue” she could think of, and she was eager to experiment, to see how many gradations of it she could produce. She was also drawn to natural indigo because kozō and the Hahnemühle paper she selected responded well to it. Both color and paper were organic, one derived from a leaf, the other from the bark of trees, another reason to pair them. Additionally, indigo has a venerable history; the first evidence of its use was in c. 4000 BC in Peru, and c. 1400 years ago in Japan, another reason she wanted to use it here. 

The selection of graphite and sumi ink was similar based on tradition and longevity, in addition to its material qualities. Both, but especially graphite, glitter when the light catches them, resembling fleeting glimpses of rain. To increase the sheen, she embedded micronized pure silver into the paper as well. And, as the mediums used in writing, the choice of graphite and sumi ink was also an homage to the word. 

“I like materials that shift, that are mercurial and come in and out of visibility,” Ando said. “It is hard to see rain, it is so elusive. To depict it is a challenge. How do you draw it? How do you draw the wind that drives it?” Her solutions include tremulous and forceful smatterings and clusters of dots, dashes, and circles that spangle, puddle, cluster, spread, and repeating threads of slanted and straight fine lines that may parallel or cross over each other. Playing off the rhythmic modulations of the indigo ground, silvered into beauty, they portray rain during the day and at night, in sunlight, moonlight, starlight, through clouds, in mist, and in different seasons, markers of time, as much reality as they are metaphor. 

One of her favorite words—there are many, including a handful for sun showers—is Kitsune No Yomeiri (Rain that Falls Even Though The Sun is Shining/The Day That Foxes Have Their Wedding Ceremony). It’s a charming tip of the hat to the frolicsome spirit of foxes. Amagakeru (Soaring Rain /Gods, Souls, Birds Fly In The Sky), another, is more sweeping, cosmic in scope. And yet another is Tamoto No Shigure (Rain On Sleeves / A Kimono Sleeve Wet From Wiping Away Tears). It intimates an entire narrative of love, loss, and longing in three written characters, haiku-like, balanced between the dispassionate and the heartbreaking. 

Ando recounted a story about Ikkyū (1394-1481), the charismatic, wildly disruptive Zen monk who reportedly once said to his fellow monks, let us not read the sutras today, let us read the rain, the moon, the stars, love letters sent from nature.  Agreeing with him, these are Ando’s love letters to nature, from nature.  

A Clear and Refreshed Mind: Miya Ando’s “Ama No Mizu 天の水 (Water of the Sky/Water of the Heavens) Rain Dictionary”
Adriana Proser, Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Quincy Scott Curator of Asian Art and Curatorial Chair, The Walters Art Museum

Looking through the 2000 images that make up “Ama no Mizu Rain Dictionary '' is a meditative journey best enjoyed between periods of rest like a pilgrimage on which there are scores of sacred sites to visit.  Miya Ando calls this compilation a dictionary, an apt term for a group of terms brought together and defined, but it is also reminiscent of the poetry anthologies with a publication history in Japan that dates back to the last quarter of the eighth century, more than 250 years after Buddhism was first introduced there and eventually came to co-exist with the native Shinto religion. By the end of Japan’s Heian period (794-1185) there were twenty-one imperial poetry anthologies, forming a cannon that was passed down through the ages and continued to expand. These anthologies brought together poems by multiple authors touching on different themes, including seasons, love, partings, and laments, among others. As one peruses the words and images Ando shares in her dictionary one finds similar subject matter. See for example #2 Akisame (Cold rain that falls in autumn), # 56 Nyūbai (Rain That Signals The Rainy Season Begins), #1950 Naku Namida Ame to Furanamu Watarigawa Mizu Masarinaba Kaeri Kurugani (“The Tears That Weep, The Rains That Drift, The River That Flows, The Water That Surpasses, I Hope She Will Come Back,”or #1994 Shigure (To Shed Tears), to name just a few. Poetic names and phrases also evoke the sounds of the rain; perhaps among the most evocative are #94 Matzukaze no Shigure (Sound Of Drizzle In The Pines),   #172 Amaochi Byōshi (Rhythm That Mimics The Rain Drops Falling From the Roof  When Learning Samisen), and #1985 Mushishigure  (Insect Rain/The Voices of Many Insects In Autumn Crying Together Sounds Like Drizzling Rain). However, Ando enhances the words with imagery, arresting specific moments in time and summoning synesthetic responses. Among those movingly paired are #126 (Rain that falls even though the sun is shining), #1974 Tangetsu (The Moon After It Rains),  and #129 Tanabataame (Rain That Falls During The Tanabata Rain Festival).

The historic imperially supported poetry collections were sumptuous affairs created with paper dyed in beautiful hues and embellished with metallics. Both the techniques of hakuokigami, adding silver and gold leaf, and sunagogami, the sprinkling of gold and silver leaf as well as other mineral powders, belong to the tradition of producing gorgeous papers in Japan. Calligraphy written in sumi in delicate vertical rows across the page from right to left – at times seeming to fall like elegant leaves or even rain drops – on this magical metallic surface are a tour-de-force synthesis of poetry and sophisticated art.  Ando similarly uses dyed kozo (mulberry) paper, traditional to Japan, or dyed paper manufactured by Hahnemühle in Europe. Her work was inspired by centuries-old techniques like sunagogami, but her application of metallics in the form of micronized silver and addition of graphite are non-traditional.

More specifically, Ando’s use of indigo dye brings to mind precedents in East Asia in general and in Japan in particular. Indeed, she found a source of inspiration at a Japanese museum years ago in an indigo-dyed copy of the very popular Heart Sutra (known as the Hannya Shingyo in Japanese). Among other things, this sutra is chanted by  Zen Buddhists before and after meditation.  The deep, saturated blue found in works like #154 Satsukiyami (A Dark Night In The Rainy Season) is very like the color used for Buddhist religious texts (sutras) written in silver or gold ink on indigo-dyed paper, sometimes also with illustrated frontice pieces of silver and gold on deep blue paper. These were often meritorious donations by wealthy patrons to important temples. Sutras of these materials in handscroll format had appeared in China, with no known earlier precedent in the Buddhist world, by the seventh or eighth century. The practice spread  from China to Korea and Japan, where it also became part of native Buddhist sutra-making practice.   

The teaching of the Buddha, his Dharma, is transmitted to the faithful through such sutras, although most created of humbler paper and ink. The Buddha wished his followers to understand that everything in this world is formless,  that the physical world is an illusion, and that the only way to escape the cycle of suffering in life after life is when his followers, like him, fully recognize this truth. This concept is beautifully conveyed by Ando’s #1970 Sengetsu (The Moon After the Rain/ A Clear And Refreshed Mind). The related concept of  impermanence, the notion that nothing and noone will last forever and will eventually be lost, manifests throughout the arts in variant forms in Japan. Mujō is the word for impermanence in Japanese.  A related word is sabi (loneliness), which came to signify an introspective type of beauty brought on by solitude. #121 Rikaisshinoharu (A Branch Of Pear Flower, Spring, Rain / A Sad And Beautiful, Weeping Woman's Face Looks Like A Pear Flower Wet With Rain) captures this feeling well.  Sabi became one of the terms closely associated with Chanoyu, the Japanese Way of Tea, an experience that foregrounds the savoring of each moment of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. From the seventeenth century onward, the term mono no aware became associated with Japan’s pleasure quarters, a transient, yet enjoyable world. In Japan beautiful women were linked with cherry blossoms, which burst in bloom only to quickly flutter to the ground, or perhaps even more sadly become saturated with rain, see Ando’s #065 Ame No Hana (Cherry Blossoms In The Rain). 

With 2000 works of art Miya Ando’s “Ama No Mizu” encapsulates layers of Japanese cultural meaning and a myriad of literary, religious, and artistic references.  As an innovative artist with feet firmly planted in both Eastern and western worlds, Ando has refreshed, built on, and made more widely accessible some of Japan’s precious heritage. She has brought profound connections within reach to all those who take the time to appreciate her meditative labors. One turns a page and savors yet another type of rain caught in one single moment in time. Conscious of it or not, in the end one discovers that all is indeed in Zen, #2000 Uchikukfuusho Minazenn Wo-Toku (Rain, Bamboo, Wind, Pine, All in Zen).

Bibliography

Denecke, Wiebke, “Anthologization and Sino-Japanese Literature: Kaifūsō and the Three Imperial Anthologies” in Shirane, Haruo and Tomi Suzuki, with David Lurie, Ed. The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 86-91.

Edgren, Soren, “Buddhist Illuminated Manuscripts in East Asia” in Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019, pp. 112-120.

Proser, Adriana. The Art of Impermanence : Japanese Works from the John C. Weber Collection and Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection, New York, N : Asia Society ; Milano, Italy: Officina Libraria, 2020.