Miya Ando

MIYA ANDO

MIYA ANDO

THE NATURE OF PERCEPTION

GALLERY MISSION

Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.

VESSELS OF THE INFINITE:

THE WORK OF MIYA ANDO EMILIE TRICE

Miya Ando’s deceptively polished and seductive works belie their industrial origins. Ando paints with chemicals as well as pigments directly onto aluminum, manipulating texture and color via heat, sandpaper, dyes and other applied processes. Her methodical application of crystalline layers coalesces in horizons of transcendent hues and light. As minimalist objects, these works on metal straddle the divide between sculpture and painting; but, for Ando, painting is in service to the object her practice is undeniably material-oriented. Similar to her Japanese ancestors Bizen swordsmiths historically revered for their craft Ando’s work is rooted in the tangible, but pays distinct homage to a collective universal spirit: the physical becomes metaphysical, the ephemeral becomes infinite.

Ando spent part of her childhood among Buddhist priests at a temple in Okayama in southern Japan. She studied Buddhism and Eastern religions at Berkeley and Yale and later apprenticed with a Japanese master metal smith. Her work elicits moments of stillness, flashes of enlightenment. There’s a calming presence to these works. And yet they themselves are not still.

Ando’s use of reflective materials employs the environment to activate her work. The time of day and quality of light shape the inner life of each piece at any given moment. The viewer completes this trifecta, ensuring that no two individuals will experience Ando’s paintings exactly the same way. Her work is subject to change.

Gray Gold Light, 2016, pigment and urethane on aluminum, 36 x 36 inches/91.5 x 91.5 cm

The effects of traversing Ando’s paintings are hypnotic. Color fields shift, day becomes night, night becomes dawn. When the viewer is activated, the painting is activated. The work is a reflection of its beholder; but not of their image, just of their perspective. There is no vanity or vulgarity on display, but rather a philosophical mandate to remember that perception is subjective, fluid and, all too often, fickle. Upon contemplation and action, the layers of these works reveal themselves. Much like the act of meditation, they require attention and reward thoughtful participation.

Beyond Ando’s paintings on aluminum, which she often builds into shimmering grids of pixeled horizons, the artist is equally well-known for her sculptures and constructed environments. In 2011, Ando created a 9/11 memorial from a thirty foot piece of reclaimed steel, salvaged from the metal carnage of what was once New York’s iconic twin towers. Reincarnated as public art, this requiem rises from the earth in jagged totemic grandeur, inciting the same stoic wonder and amazement as a monolithic primordial altar. The work is on permanent display at the entrance of Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London.

In 2015, for the Frontiers Reimagined exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale, Ando created a minimalist

temple she titled Emptiness the Sky (Shou Sugi Ban).

Composed of charred wooden walls a freestanding sculpture that functioned as a room within a room the piece’s painted aluminum interior reveals the infinite depth of one’s own consciousness. It is a room for reflection, both literally and figuratively, built with clean, modest lines that embody Ando’s Zen aesthetic.

Even more indicative of Ando’s Buddhist sensibility are her bodhi-leaf mandalas, mixed-media works of hand-dyed, hand-sewn bodhi (Ficus religiosa) leaves, which pay homage to the sacred fig tree under which the Buddha first achieved nirvana. Mandalas are traditionally revered as cosmic diagrams. Symbolic and ritualized, these circular graphs speak to the divine organization of the universe and to the cycle(s) of life. By exposing the leaves’ exquisitely delicate skeletons, Ando reconnects these metaphysical and spiritual forms to the physical body and the inherent biology that unites all living beings during passage through this world; this time; this space.

Ando inevitably liberated her leaves from their twodimensional planes, cascading them en masse from ceilings in ethereal hanging grids and spirals that suggest cosmic cyclones. Forms found in nature the fractals and organic networks that constitute life represent the ultimate connection to our collective,

spiritual core and our human relationship to all those sentient beings that came before, as well as those yet to be born. As tribute to this ancestry, Ando coated one thousand bodhi leaves in non-toxic resin and phosphorus. The work references the Japanese Obon festival, a Buddhist custom initiated more than 500 years ago that honors the spirits of one’s ancestors. Released into a pond in Puerto Rico, Ando’s bodhi leaves absorbed sunlight all day and glowed all night, becoming a micro-universe of gently undulating lights floating softly, silently across darkened waters.

Ando’s artistry is transformative, an alchemy in which solid blocks of glass ensconce clouds, rain and smoke. The artist’s hand is omnipresent and yet mysterious, almost invisible. Her work investigates unified binaries, the yin yang of cosmic harmony, and builds depth from surface, light from dark and strength from the stillness of simply being. These are objects of beauty, which also cut deeply. Much like Ando herself, whose femininity often exists in contrast to her hard-edged materials and quasiindustrial studio practice, her art rejoices in the balance found between seeming opposites; the symbiosis of duality. As with our own human bodies, whose strength will inevitably wither and one day acquiesce to impermanence, Ando’s art provides vessels for the infinite, reminding us that within this temporal existence there remain currents of eternity, gently coaxing us toward an ever-receding, shared horizon.

Emilie Trice is a curator and art advisor specializing in contemporary culture. A graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont, Trice began her career at Gagosian Gallery in New York before moving to Berlin in 2006 where she spent five years as an art dealer, curator and writer/translator.

After returning to the United States, Trice worked as the director of 212GALLERY in Aspen, Colorado, and curated an annual pop-up exhibition of original works by Andy Warhol in collaboration with Christie’s and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

In 2014, Trice co-curated On Love and Other Teachers, a show of emerging Kazakh artists as part of ARTBAT Fest (curated by Christina SteinbrecherPfandt, director of Viennacontemporary). She was included in the Saatchi Gallery’s online platform “100 Curators 100 Days” and was a judge in Saatchi’s Photography in Motion Prize, in collaboration with Google. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, on artnet.com, and on artforum.com.

Hamon 4.3, 2015, pigment and urethane on aluminum, 48 x 36 inches/122 x 91.5 cm

Hamon 40.40.1, 2015, pigment and urethane on aluminum, 40 x 40 inches/101.75 x 101.75 cm

Hamon Diptych 1, 2016, pigment and urethane on aluminum, 48 x 96 inches/122 x 244 cm

Hamon 40.40.6, 2016, pigment and urethane on aluminum, 40 x 40 inches/101.75 x 101.75 cm

Hamon Polyptych, 2016, urethane on aluminum, 48 x 120 inches/122 x 305 cm

Faint Gold Gray Triptych, 2016, pigment, urethane and resin on aluminum, 48 x 38 inches/122 x 96.75 cm

Natsu Summer Yellow Orange, 2016, pigment, urethane and resin on aluminum, 36 x 36 inches/91.5 x 91.5 cm

Ukigumo Gold Green Mandala, 2016, pigment, dye and urethane on stainless steel, 40-inch tondo/101.75 cm

Sabi Rust Transformation 3.3.1, 2016, pigment and urethane on aluminum, 36 x 36 inches/91.5 x 91.5 cm

Triptych,

and mineral

on

108 inches/92

274.5 cm

Hakkanai Gray Purple Olive, 2016, pigment, urethane and resin on aluminum, 36 x 36 inches/91.5 x 91.5 cm

Indigo Line, 2015, pigment and urethane on aluminum, 48 x 48 inches/122 x 122 cm

Aka Red, 2016, pigment and urethane on aluminum, 48 x 48 inches/122 x

cm

Olive Shift, 2016, pigment, urethane and resin on aluminum, 36 x 36 inches/91.5 x 91.5 cm

Green Gold Yellow Shift, 2016, pigment, urethane and resin on aluminum, 36 x 36 inches/91.5 x 91.5 cm

Transformation Blue Indigo, 2016, pigment, urethane and resin on aluminum, 36 x 36 inches/91.5 x 91.5 cm

MIYA ANDO

Miya Ando (b. 1973) is an American artist. She is a descent of Bizen sword-makers and was raised in a Buddhist temple in Japan and in coastal Northern California.

Ando has a Bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and attended Yale University to study Buddhist iconography and imagery. She apprenticed with a master metalsmith in Japan, followed by a residency at Northern California’s Public Art Academy. Her work has been shown worldwide, including at the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, California; in a show curated by Nat Trotman of the Guggenheim Museum; and an exhibition at the Queens Museum, New York. In 2015, a large shou-sugi-ban installation by the artist was featured in Frontiers Reimagined, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, and a monumental suspended work was permanently installed at Montefiore Hospital in New York.

She has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture in London built from World Trade Center steel to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was recently nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2012. She lives and works in New York.

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President and curator: Sundaram Tagore

Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey

Director, Hong Kong: Faina Derman

Director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor

Exhibition coordinator/registrar: Julia Occhiogrosso

Designer: Russell Whitehead

Editorial support: Kieran Doherty

Text and photographs © 2016 Miya Ando

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover: Hamon 5.5.1, 2016, pigment and urethane on aluminum, 60 x 60 inches/152.5 x 152.5 cm