Yukako Ando inaugurates an additional exhibition space at Commonwealth & Council with A little bird told me.

Garden border fences and picture postcards posit an altering gravitational force and perspective in Ando’s wall installations. Fences maintain their function of delineating parameters yet in their verticality propose another axis to shift the outlines of public/private, inside/outside, self/other, and us/them. Picture postcards with their shared purpose in similar color palette, sentiment, and nostalgia, collect into a protruding geometric formation to reorient the horizon of an imagined landscape with multiple vantage points. With these works, Ando considers the changes in our method of communication and lifestyle, making a stance on slow living (slow travel, slow movement, and downshifting).

Ando focuses on the everyday phenomena from which the fundamental questions of life are configured. The point of departure for Ando’s work is her personal experience of the real world as a complex living environment, in which truth and fiction blend as equal parts of our consciousness to form a unified platform for our subjective experience. This personal existential foundation provides the substance and historical context for Ando’s work and practice, which consist of experimental actions and instructions for actions that exist as multimedia installations.

Born in Osaka, Japan, Yukako Ando is an artist based in Düsseldorf, Germany. Ando received her MA from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2001. She is a 2013 fellow of the Overseas Study Program for Artists by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs which funded her 2014 residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. She is also a recipient of the 2014 Japan-United States Exchange Friendship Program in the Arts Fellowship from the Art of Japan-United States Friendship Commission. Ando currently lives and works in Los Angeles.