Sundaram Tagore Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Miya Ando showcasing a new series of color-suffused paintings on metal informed by an ancient Japanese nature-based calendar.
The exhibition is a meditation on time, where painting functions as a system through which seasonal time is structured, observed, and made perceptible through color. The works immerse viewers in the subtle rhythms of the natural world, inviting reflection not only on impermanence, but on the beauty embedded in each passing moment.
Ando (b. 1973, Los Angeles) has received critical acclaim for her atmospheric paintings and large-scale installations that articulate fleeting natural phenomena, including clouds, rain, and the night sky. Her practice is rooted in the Japanese philosophical concept mono no aware, loosely translated as “an acute awareness of the transience of things,” a bittersweet sentiment often linked to nature and the passage of time. For Ando, who was raised between two vastly different worlds—a Buddhist temple in Japan and the redwood forest of northern California—the cyclical nature of the natural world serves as a metaphor for impermanence and interdependence.
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a grid comprising twelve 30 x 30-inch (76.2 x 76.2 cm) paintings arranged into four columns, in which each work corresponds to a specific moment within the year. The paintings are structured according to the seventy-two microseasons of a centuries-old East Asian calendar, which divides the year into five- to six-day intervals. Each interval is marked by natural phenomena, such as rain moistening the soil, peach blossoms coming into bloom, or wild geese returning north. Presented together, the paintings trace the progression of the year through seasonal transformation and color.
Ando’s acute understanding of color comes vividly to the fore. Her palette of radiant hues draws from kasane no irome, a traditional Japanese system of layered color combinations developed during the Heian period (794–1185). Derived primarily from flowers and plants, these layered chromatic structures that codified the seasons across painting, poetry, food, apparel, and architecture were associated with specific moments of the year, and use outside those periods was considered improper. Mastering the poetic visual language of kasane was an indicator of cultural refinement and fine attunement to the natural world.
Clothing, for example, was worn in layers so that multiple colors were revealed along necklines, hems, and cuffs to reflect the changing seasons. Ando, whose family lineage dates back hundreds of years in Japan, recalls watching her grandmother take great care to coordinate the various components of her kimono to align with what was blooming outside.
Kasane, however, is more than a sequence of colors inspired by the natural world. It symbolizes specific temporal states—from emergence to bloom to senescence to decline—made perceivable through the accumulation of tonal shifts.
To articulate this concept, Ando employs nioi, an element of kasane that refers to a diffusion or gradation of color. In nioi, tones move gradually from light to dark without a defined edge. In Ando’s hands, the technique becomes a means to visually express duration and temporal transition through color. Compositionally, the paintings are subtle and distilled. Each of the twelve paintings represents a distinct seasonal interval—the entire grid spanning early spring to late winter.
Also on view are new large-scale paintings from the artist’s ongoing cloud series, which have been showcased in a number of museum exhibitions, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Noguchi Museum, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where her 2016 painting Kumo (Cloud) 6 was acquired for the museum’s permanent collection. Ando also brings together clouds and nuanced seasonal shifts in a second grid of seventy-two 14 x 14-inch (35.5 x 35.5 cm) ink paintings on aluminum that correspond individually to each microseason.
Ando’s cloud series, begun in 2013, centers on fugitive imagery of clouds observed at exact moments and locations. In the new works on view in London, Ando extends that temporal framework across a broader range of seasons, including early winter and late summer.
Through the use of color and surface treatment, Ando evokes the sublime, ephemeral nature of clouds in a variety of atmospheric conditions, from a spring moon obscured behind a veil of mist to a vivid blue sky glimpsed through silvery clouds on a midsummer morning. Using watercolor-like techniques as well as printing techniques, she layers translucent washes of ink and pigment while leaving some areas of the surface exposed, allowing the metal substructure to reflect and refract light. In some works, she incorporates micronized pure silver, which lends luminosity.