This solo exhibition of new and recent drawings began with Miya Ando’s interest in the remarkable specificity with which rain has been observed and named in Japan. The work on view expands on Ando’s award-winning book Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Words for Rain (The MIT Press, 2025).
Capturing rain’s many expressions, the book is a compendium of 2,000 Japanese words for rain and Ando’s English interpretations accompanied by 100 of the original 2,000 drawings she created over three years using natural indigo dye, graphite, and pure silver powder on handmade kōzo paper. The complete body of work is preserved in a monumental hand-bound volume, of which only two copies were made, each comprising 2,209 pages with hand-dyed indigo linen covers. One copy will be on view during the exhibition.
Ando conceived the rain drawings as visual interpretations of her written translations, giving equal importance to language and image. For this exhibition, she created entirely new visual interpretations of selected words that she returned to and reconsidered at a larger scale.
Ando’s investigations of rain, moons, clouds, and nuanced seasonal shifts reflect a broader examination of fleeting natural phenomena as expressions of time and the ways in which we perceive it. In her multidisciplinary practice, she employs materials that register light, atmosphere, and duration. Reflective metal surfaces shift subtly as the viewer moves around them, while layers of translucent printed fabric reveal delicate variations in color and depth that emerge through sustained observation.
Here, she brings language into her material vocabulary and considers the question: What happens to our perception of an ephemeral phenomenon when it’s given a name? “Language can direct our attention toward subtle distinctions in the natural world, making conditions perceptible that might otherwise pass unnoticed,” Ando says. “My work begins with this process of close observation and differentiation, and with the question of how those distinctions can be carried from language into visual and material experience.”
Ando has been familiar with indigo dye since childhood. Her family is from Okayama, a prefecture in western Japan known for its centuries-old traditions of indigo dyeing. She recalls growing up surrounded by indigo and spent years learning about its unique properties. Indigo is a botanical dye whose color varies according to the length of time it remains in contact with the underlying medium. A brief exposure results in pale blue; longer exposures produce increasingly deeper shades that can eventually approach near-black. Time is both a subject of the drawings and integral to the process through which they are made.
The process of working with natural indigo dye, however, is unforgiving. As soon as the dye touches the paper, the clock starts. There is no way to lighten or reverse a mark once it has been made. The technical challenges are compounded by scale, with larger works calling for even greater concentration. Creating a controlled gradient requires intense focus as Ando carefully manipulates the duration of exposure in increments of seconds in order to produce a smooth transition from light to dark.
Ando incorporates pure powdered silver, graphite, and, occasionally, sumi (a traditional black ink used in calligraphy and brush painting) to articulate rain and other natural phenomena. The compositions move between subtle landscapes and shifting perspectives, including views that look upward through rain toward a deep blue sky. Sizes range from 39 × 39 inches to a 94 × 94-inch work, in which rain, mist, moonlight, and darkness become visceral atmospheric fields when encountered at such scale.
Through this interplay of time, language, and material, Ando invites us to consider whether naming something changes the way we see it and whether greater precision in language can lead to greater attention in looking.
