This painting by Miya Ando depicts the traces of meteors in a Alpha Centaurids meteor shower Ando witnessed on February 9, 2021. The painting was made by exposing mulberry paper to natural indigo dye. The longer indigo makes contact with the surface of the paper, the darker blue the surface becomes. As Ando notes, “Indigo is like a little clock of coloration.” The painting belongs to a series of works Ando debuted in her solo exhibition Kumoji (Cloud Path / A Road Traversed By Birds And The Moon) at Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago. The series depicts ephemeral phenomena such as stars, rain, celestial phenomena, and the phases of the moon. A practicing Buddhist, Ando works a lot with natural phenomena to express the idea of impermanence. The ephemeral qualities of stars, rain, clouds, and the phases of the moon illustrate the sentiment behind the Japanese phrase “mono no aware,” roughly translated as “the pathos of things.” Beauty fades; strength dissolves into frailty. Everything follows this rule; it is the vernacular of nature. “Something becomes more beautiful and sublime the more impermanent it is,” Ando says. “There’s a psychological shift that occurs when one recognizes the pathos of falling cherry blossoms, or the moon going through phases, or a passing cloud.”