Forged In Steel: Miya Ando Turns Warrior Heritage Into Artistic Inspiration

Artist and sculptor Miya Ando is something of a powerhouse. A descendant of Bizen sword makers and Buddhist priests, Ando was raised between a temple in Okayama, Japan and the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. Transferring this unique heritage into her artistic practice, Ando combines traditional steel-working techniques with her own alchemic innovations to create an entirely new way of approaching the medium. Preparing for the launch of her solo show at K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco, writer and critic Sean Higgins was able to catch up with Ando for a chat about art, nature, and the power of solitude.

If the worlds of the technological and the natural have always been in conversation, it has been a contentious one. Miya Ando, whose solo show Tides and Phases of the Moon opens at K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco on October 3rd, draws on this essential conflict for her distinctive paintings. On one hand, her process relies heavily on industrial techniques and materials, making use of noxious chemicals, torches, and sometimes electrical current to treat the steel or aluminum sheets she uses as painting surfaces. On the other hand, the images she paints on these sheets are thoughtful and articulate about naturalistic themes including impermanence, transition, and the effects of the environmental systems obscured from our attention in the modern day. Through this juxtaposition, Ando's paintings pull off an elegant trick—man-made technologies that were designed to limit nature are repurposed as a medium for expressing its influence.

The Creators Project: Can you talk a little bit about how technology inspires your work?

Miya Ando: Yes absolutely. In my most recent work, I've created a process of hand brushing dye onto anodized aluminum plates to create something that feels like an 'industrial watercolor'. Anodizing aluminum is an industrial, electrochemical process that changes the crystal structure of the surface of aluminum. I manipulate this process and combine layers of hand-painted dyes to the surface, creating a painterly effect unlike anything achievable on canvas. The result is extremely durable and permanent but looks fragile and temporary.

I also use patinas and heat from a torch to transform the surface of metals when I create my steel paintings. There is something of an alchemical feel when one turns grey steel into a spectrum of colors.

About how long do you spend working on each of the anodized aluminum paintings?

The dying process is immediate. But what I do is layers of dye. I mix up my own coloring. I work on a whole bunch of them over the course of a week or so and I'll do layers of color, and then I wash everything off with a big hose and then I'll paint. It's like a watercolor—the dye mixes to a consistency of water, so it's really like taking a brush and painting different colors and layers on top of each other and washing them. Sometimes I submerge the paintings into big vats of dye and pull them out very very gradually to get the gradients of color. It's a really fun process, it's like a Wellies, rubber-boots and rubber-apron type situation, it's very wet, you know.

That sounds fun. You had mentioned that you work with anodized aluminum but that you manipulate the process; can you speak a bit more about that?

Anodizing aluminum really is an industrial process of hardening the material, basically electrochemically coating the aluminum with various crystals. I use a type that grows sapphire crystals onto the surface of the aluminum. Depending of the voltage, and on the amount of time it's sitting in the bath for—I work with all these elements. It gets very technical, there's a lot of chemistry involved, like in how much amperage is used, and in how thick the coating of the crystals get. And this all effects how I can layer the dye in the piece, the saturation of the colors. Sometimes I will shift the traditional or conventional way that something is anodized in order to achieve a visual effect.

So how did you discover anodizing? What brought you to this process?

Well, I worked solely with steel for the first six years of my art practice. It's only been since 2009 that I've been anodizing. I actually had an accident where I was installing a giant piece in a chapel in Louisville Kentucky, and I cracked some of my ribs with a piece of steel.

Oh no.

Yeah, it was awful. And then I had a large-scale exhibition of larger works so I switched over to aluminum just because it's a third of the weight and I'm constantly picking up four-foot-square sheets of metal. So I shifted over to aluminum and then I taught myself all these different types of ways to transform the surface—the core of my practice is the transformation of surfaces. I work with patinas, and heat, and a torch, and fire, and changing color via chemicals, but then I was introduced to anodizing, which is another way to permanently transform the coloration of the material. And I started practicing with that, and right away I started to mix my own dyes, and then hand-paint them. So this is really really pioneering, because thus far Donald Judd had anodized and dyed his box sculptures, but to my knowledge no one else has taken the dyes, mixed their own colors, and then applied them with a brush onto the substrate.

You mentioned that the focus of your work is the changing of surfaces, what attracts you to this type of process? 

I think that the vocabulary of transformation, where you encounter a plate of steel, or a plate of aluminum that you regard normally as an object or a substrate that is silver or that is grey and then you see that permanently transformed into a gradient or another color, that really is metaphoric. That vocabulary of ascending colors or fades or transitions. My work is about temporality and time and this idea of evoking an idea of ephemerality or transitory-ness with that language of change.  Something that goes from a steel plate to a redder and redder and redder hue, for example, that suggests a vocabulary of movement or change. I very much like the idea of re-seeing materials and seeing them in unexpected ways. Steel and metals are very strong and durable and permanent, but then I can paint something onto them that looks very soft and very delicate and fragile like a cloud or changing light. So that juxtaposition has always been very interesting to me as a person who looks at impermanence and permanence and these are the sorts of notions that make the core of what I'm investigating with my art practice.

I'd like to talk a little about the collaboration you recently did with Bang & Olufsen. Knowing the company, and the company's products, they seem to have a very futuristic aesthetic, where your own work feels comparatively quite traditional. What attracted to you to the idea of working with them?

They emailed me and said, "Hey we love this, what is this that you're doing? This hand-dyeing, anodizing aluminum, we've never seen anything like this before." They said "we've seen your paintings and we're curious as to what you're doing. We've been anodizing aluminum for 40 years" and the man who emails me is their chief aluminum engineer and chemist, and he's really an expert who figures out how to anodize every object that they make. And I said that I figured out a way to apply the dyes with a brush and hand-paint everything and they were very curious about that, given that their mission is innovation and craftsmanship and they're very much about continuing to investigate within the craft of working with this material. And when I was speaking to them I became very interested because they spoke a lot about how nature actually inspires their design—and yes, it looks very futuristic—but I like starkness, I like very minimal and austere design, personally. I flew into the Lund Airport [in Sweden] and drove for like three and a half hours into the middle of the country, so these people are very deep in nature. I mean, there were sheep involved on a big level.

Miya Ando Steel Skate Decks. [Hot Rolled Steel Diamond Plate, 24 k gold leaf]

This must have been quite an experience.

Oh, it was. My work is hugely inspired by nature and namely this—you know, I was raised in Japan as a little girl—this idea that nature is sacred and there are spirits that dwell in trees and there is a deity for like, thunder. All of these things inspire my work quite a bit and so we came to this understanding. And I said to them “I’d like to make a group of works inspired by the changing of light.” And we had sort of a meeting of minds on that concept and just proceeded from there. And I’m really an innovator in terms of the transformation of surfaces—I mean the steel patina paintings, and the anodizing, and I’m very interested in pushing and creating things that have yet to be seen. So it was a really good match.

It sounds like it! I wanted to ask also—you’ve called yourself an artist of light, did working with a speaker, or a sonic object, affect your artistic process or your results?

I’m a huge music fan, so it’s right in my wheelhouse. Of course, being in the visual realm, I really regard myself as having a dialog with the sort of world community via the paintings and sculpture I create, so it’s another dialog, another way of communicating—through sound—there’s transcendence with music. And I thought a lot about that and therefore the works that I made for this project are about ascension and transcendence. These colors moving up and fading away—and it’s light, but to me it’s also another way of looking at music and sound and how this really can transport you to another place.

In one of the pictures you sent along, there was a shot of you working in the factory they have for manufacturing the speakers. How was that? What was it like to be in such an unusual space?

It’s a huge, industrial factory. Aluminum is a very unusual, exotic sort of substrate to work with in terms of the art world. I don’t think a lot of people paint on aluminum; I don’t think a lot of people create two-dimensional works with aluminum. And anodizing really is an industrial process; it’s used by NASA to make aluminum hard for their space crafts to go out into space and for satellites, so this is truly an industrial process. For myself, I’m not an artist who needs certain light or a certain mood or a certain song—I really think that quietness and focus is inside. I can work anywhere, so it’s just a matter of being focused and executing the concept and being able to wield the technique and innovate at the same time. I was happy that I could do that in a totally foreign place with giant machines, and hundreds of people working. People kept coming by and looking at me like I had come from Mars—“who is this little being?” This girl is here with just a thousand buckets of color and they were just like “what in the hell is this?”

銀河 Ginga [Galaxy / Silver River], hand dyed anodized aluminum plate, 2010.

You’ve talked about harmony between contradictory things as one of the main focuses of your work. I’m wondering if there were any other contrasts you see at play in the work that you’ve done with the company? 

Well, I look around and I see that the works—regardless of whether they’re the sculptures or the paintings or even my public art—I find a sort of balance and harmony within disparate things. I’ll take very permanent, hard material or industrial material and work on it until it becomes something that is the opposite of that, so that it looks like something that has come from nature like sky or the sea or a cloud or something and that’s just sort of the philosophy that governs my work and the ethos of my practice stems from that, or draws from that. But I think that industrial and natural, that is something that I looked at very carefully, hard and soft, or fragile and delicate vs permanent and very very durable.

It’s also a way of using my hands and working with an almost anachronistic material—so steel and aluminum—and really making things by hand as almost a counterpoint to the virtual world where things all exist in this ethereal space of cyberness.