Miya Ando: Flower Atlas

Curated by Kendal Henry

2023 Brookfield Place New York Annual Arts Commission - This award provides each year’s recipient with the opportunity to create art in a unique way in a public setting. Ando is the 2023 recipient, using her art to highlight consequences of climate change.

Exhibition: Monday, July 10, 2023 – Thursday, September 14, 2023

Artist Talk: Thursday, July 20, 2023; 6 – 8PM 

Interdisciplinary artist Miya Ando reimagines the year 2023 not in days, but in flowers depicting the 72 seasons of the nature-based ancient Japanese system of time-telling. The installation comes to life through 72 cloth banners suspended in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place.

What if we measured time not in months, days, and hours, but in flowers? Flower Atlas, by Japanese and American artist Miya Ando, imagines such a world, representing 2023 in the form of 365 signature flowers in bloom each day somewhere on Earth.

The exhibition, commissioned by Arts Brookfield, greets viewers as a cascade of 72 cloth banners suspended across the majestic glass atrium, the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place. Each banner corresponds to one of 72 phenological seasons as defined by the Japanese Kõ calendar – a traditional, observation-based calendar adapted from the 24-season Chinese lunisolar calendar. Detailing subtle changes in the natural world, the Kõ calendar demarcates time as a series of natural events such as, “Fish Emerge from the Ice” (Feb. 14-18) and “Plums Turn Yellow” (June 16-20) are two examples, to render an alternative almanac of the living world with organic precision.

Flower Atlas further distills these seasons into 365 flowers in bloom each day of the year, somewhere on the surface of Earth. Soaring above visitors, the 72 banners create a moveable feast of tactile, temporal imagery, luring guests to pinpoint dates by flower and season, in the process attuning them to the impermanence and interconnectedness of all living systems.

Ando’s work presents physical articulations of her contemplation of the cycles of nature and the passage of time, in which concept, image, and materials fuse to create totemic objects. Taking as their subject the fleeting phenomena of seasons, day, night, clouds, and tides, her sculptural work is rendered in ink, pigment, micronized silver, gold, mica, oil, or resin, effectively harnessing materials of permanence to express notions of transience.

Learn more about the exhibition HERE.