Miya Ando: The Colors of the 72 Microseasons

Sundaram Tagore Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition in London by New York-based artist Miya Ando (b. 1973, Los Angeles), showcasing new paintings on metal informed by ancient Japanese nature-based systems of timekeeping.

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 on impermanence and the beauty embedded in each passing moment.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a grid comprising twelve paintings, which trace the passage of the year through early, middle, and late phases of each season.

Ando’s 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 codified the seasons across painting, poetry, food, apparel, and architecture, and use outside those periods was considered improper. Mastering the poetic visual language of kasane was an indicator of cultural refinement and 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 distinct temporal states—from emergence to bloom to decline—made perceptible through the accumulation of tonal shifts. To articulate this concept, Ando employs nioi, an element of kasane that refers to the diffusion or gradation of color. Tones move gradually from light to dark without a defined edge. In Ando’s hands, the technique becomes a means of expressing duration and temporal transition through color. 

Also on view are new large-scale paintings from the artist’s cloud series, which have been presented 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’s cloud series, begun in 2013, centers on fugitive imagery of clouds observed at exact moments and locations. In the new paintings on view in London, Ando extends that temporal framework across a broader range of seasons, including early winter and late summer.

Using watercolor-like techniques as well as printing techniques, Ando layers translucent washes of ink and pigment while leaving some areas of the substrate exposed, allowing the metal to reflect and refract light. In some works, Ando incorporates micronized pure silver, which lends luminosity.

Ando also brings together clouds and nuanced seasonal shifts in a second grid of seventy-two 35.5 x 35.5 cm (14 x 14 inch) ink paintings on aluminum. The paintings are structured according to the seventy-two microseasons of an ancient Japanese calendar, which divides the year into five- to six-day intervals marked by natural phenomena, such as rain moistening the soil, peach blossoms coming into bloom, or wild geese returning north.