WATER OF THE SKY

An artist’s book of abstract visions of rain.

Ando’s art reflects the natural world in its most elemental form and, in doing so, captures the marvelous mystery of its simplest phenomenon. While creating the book, Ando gave physical form to 2,000 Japanese terms for “rain,” drawing from classical texts and Buddhist scripture as well as from Japan’s 72 traditional micro-seasons and phrases in regional dialects. The book is able to hold only 100 images, but the representative selection is wonderful. Spending time with Ando’s artwork allows the reader to sink under the weight of a heavy storm, soar into clouds spitting sudden showers, and inhale the rich dampness of rain-soaked earth. The images are visually unified by the medium of indigo dye but vary by degree—some rain-scapes are consumed by a deep darkness of heavy ink, while others appear nearly white, haunted by the ghost of water. Clouds bloom quick where ink has leeched away. Sharp, silvery-gray streaks of graphite, invoking fast, fierce rainfall, pierce through images like stinging needles. In an erudite foreword, Hollis Goodall, former curator of Japanese Art at LACMA, ties Ando’s work to the Zen Buddhist embrace of the transience of all things. The artist’s preface addresses her own multilayered personal purpose, the images’ immediacy (“a time capsule or an extinction diary”), even the viewer’s primitive response to the work. Having cultivated her own “wonder and ardent respect for nature” since childhood, the author urges the viewer to linger in that mode. Finally, Ando provides a dictionary of the phrases that inspired her images, including their kanji characters, Japanese phonetic reading, romanized spelling, and English translation.

A meditative artistic practice that encourages deep reflection.