Fujiko Nakaya

is a Japanese artist, a member of Experiments in Art and Technology, and a promoter, supporter, and practitioner of Japanese video art. She is best known for her fog sculptures.

Early life and education Nakaya was born in Sapporo in 1933, where her father Ukichirō Nakaya, who is credited with making the first artificial snowflakes, was at the time an assistant professor at Hokkaido University. Her father later produced a number of documentary films and radio programs and founded Iwanami Productions, a producer of documentary and educational films. Ukichirō Nakaya was also an accomplished sumi-e artist, and in 1960 his ink paintings were shown alongside Fujiko Nakaya's oil paintings in an exhibition at Sherman Gallery in Chicago. In recent years exhibitions at Oslo Kunstforening and Le Forum at Ginza Maison Hermès have illustrated the influence of Ukichiro Nakaya's ideas and scientific practice on Fujiko Nakaya's artmaking.

Fujiko Nakaya went to high school in Tokyo, graduating from Japan Women's University High School. After high school, she went to the United States to pursue a degree at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA. She graduated from Northwestern with a Bachelor of Arts in 1957 and went on to study painting in Paris and Madrid up until 1959.

Career After spending some time in Europe where she briefly studied with Leonard Foujita (aka Fūjita Tsuguharu), Nakaya returned to Japan in 1960. She exhibited her oil paintings in the two-person show with her father at the Sherman Art Gallery in Chicago (1960) followed by her first solo exhibition, featuring twelve paintings, at Tokyo Gallery (1962). ) to create a fog sculpture for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. Nakaya considered nature to be a collaborator in this project, so she and Mee conducted a number of tests to see how the natural conditions of the site might shape the fog. They conducted tests of the output of various atomizing devices, wind tunnel tests of models of the pavilion, and studies of the wind patterns at the Pepsi Pavilion site in Osaka.

After Expo '70, Nakaya continued working as a part of Experiments in Art and Technology by establishing the Tokyo branch of E.A.T. with Kobayashi Hakudō and Morioka Yūji. Their first project was the Tokyo node of the project Utopia Q&A, 1981 that ran from July 30 to September 30, 1971 at the Fuji Xerox showroom in the Sony Building, Ginza. The Tokyo terminal was connected to terminals in New York, Stockholm, and Ahmedabad by telex, and over the course of August, 1971, the four terminals traded messages predicting what the world might be like ten years into the future, in 1981. This telex network was organized on the occasion of the exhibition Utopias & Visions 1871-1981 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, curated by Pontus Hultén for the hundredth anniversary of the Paris Commune. She was a central member of the video collective Video Hiroba that formed on the occasion of this show, and worked on both community collaborative projects and individual video sculptures from the 1970s through the 1990s. Her works have often been cited as examples of Video Hiroba's oeuvre, including her 1972 piece Friends of Minamata Victims—Video Diary and her 1973 interactive installation Old People's Wisdom — Cultural DNA. Yet beyond making video works, she also translated texts on video and promoted Japanese artists abroad. In 1974 she published a Japanese translation of Michael Shamberg's Guerilla Television, through Bijutsu Shuppansha, and translated other texts for the magazine Bijutsu Techō.

In 1980 Nakaya opened Japan's first video art gallery in Harajuku. The gallery was named Video Gallery SCAN by her friend and collaborator, video artist Bill Viola. The gallery sponsored semiannual competitions for new works by artists, thus becoming a platform for promising new video artists to display their work. It also presented solo exhibitions through a series called SCAN FOCUS. Notable FOCUS exhibitions featured Bill Viola, DCTV, Nam June Paik, Norio Imai, and Mako Idemitsu. Artist and art critic Kenjirō Okazaki has written extensively on Nakaya's work, and ties her fog works to the work of her father, scientist Ukichirō Nakaya. Okazaki likens Fujiko Nakaya's interest in video and fog to her father's use of photography and film to record snow and atmospheric conditions, Okazaki links the indeterminacy of Nakaya's fog and video works through the idea of medium:The notion of “freedom” is conditioned by such behavior of medium. Therefore, the devotion to medium found in Fujiko Nakaya’s works fundamentally contradicts with artworks posited as forms of expression (these are bound to be regulated as deterministic tautology, stuck in the repetition of the same). What her works instead reveal is the force that transcends and overflows all forms of regulation: the behavior of medium, which is the absolute condition for “freedom” in this world (along with our “free will”). When working in fog, Nakaya often collaborates with other creators, including video artist Bill Viola, light artist Shiro Takatani, dancers Trisha Brown and Min Tanaka, and musician Ryūichi Sakamoto. In 1992 Nakaya collaborated with Atsushi Kitagawara Architects to create a playground in which dense fog envelops visitors twice each hour at Showa Kinen Park in Tokyo. Visitors experience the sense of being lost as the fog develops and being found again as the fog dissipates. The work is intended to evoke a reverence for nature and a reminder of the cycle of life and death. In 2002 Nakaya acted as a consultant to architects Diller + Scofidio on Blur Building , created for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchâtel in Yverdon-les-Bains. According to the pair, Nakaya thought their original idea unachievable, but "it was her idea about irregular nozzle concentrations that saved the day."

Nakaya has received numerous awards including the Australian Cultural Award, the Laser d’Or at the Locarno International Video Festival, the Yoshida Isoya Special Award, the Minister for Posts and Telecommunications Award for artistic contribution to HDTV programming and the Special Achievement Prize at the 2008 Japan Media Arts Festival

Works

1970 : Fog Sculpture "PEPSI PAVILION," Expo '70, Osaka 1972 : Friends of Minamata Victims—Video Diary 1973 : Old People's Wisdom—Cultural DNA, installation at Computer Art '73, Sony Building, Ginza, Tokyo 1974 : Standing an Egg, interactive video installation at the Eleventh Japan International Contemporary Art Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo 1974 : Fog Environment for David Tudor Concert "ISLAND EYE ISLAND EAR" (Collaboration with David Tudor, Jacqueline Monnier), Knavelskar Island, Sweden (Produced by E.A.T.) 1976 : Fog Sculpture #94768: Earth Talk, The 2nd Biennale of Sydney, (renamed Foggy Wake in a Desert in 1983 for National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) 1980 : Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503, for Trisha Brown Dance Company, New York (recreated in 1981, 1996, and 2010) 1980 : Cloud Lake, The 11th International Sculpture Conference 1980 : Fog Sculpture: Kawaji, Festival of Light, Sound and Fog, Tochigi (collaboration with Bill Viola) 1981: Waterfall: An Integrated River, video installation at The Miyagi Museum of Art, Miyagi 1983 : Fog Sculpture #94925: Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (permanent installation) 1983 : Meltee-vee, video installation at Museum of Modern Art, Toyoma 1988 : Fog Sculpture: Skyline, Jardin de l'eau, Parc de la Villette, Paris 1990-1 : Four Wells, video installation, National Art Center, Tokyo 1992 : Foggy Forest, Children's Park, Showa Memorial Park, Tachikawa (Tokyo) 1994 : "Greenland Glacial Moraine Garden", Ukichiro Nakaya Museum of Snow and Ice, Kaga City, Japan (Architect : Arata Isozaki), Kaga 1998 : Fog Sculpture #08025: F.O.G., Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (Permanent Collection) 2001 : IRIS, Fog Sculpture in collaboration with Shiro Takatani in Valencia Harbour, The 1st Valencia Biennial, Spain 2004 : Fog Sculpture #28634: "Dialogue", Technology for Living: Experiments in Art and Technology, Norrköpings konstmuseum, Norrköping 2005 : Fog Chamber-Riga #26422, for Conversations with Snow and Ice, The Natural History Museum of Latvia, Riga 2010 : Cloud Forest, fog installation, light and sound in collaboration with Shiro Takatani, commissioned by the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] 2011 : fog installation in collaboration with Shiro Takatani, Ishibutai Tumulus, Asuka Historical Park, Nara 2011 : Fog Garden #07172 - Moss Garden Nicey-sur-Aire, Vent des forêts, Arrondissement de Commercy 2013 : Fog Bridge #72494, Exploratorium, San Francisco 2014: Veil, The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut 2015 : "Fog Bridge", fog installation and exhibition at the Arnolfini Centre of Contemporary Arts, commissioned for IBT15 Bristol International Festival, England 2017 : Pathfinder #18700 Oslo, Ekebergparken, Oslo, Norway 2018 : "Fog x FLO" includes five site-responsive installations along Fredrick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy 2022 : "Munich Fog (Wave), #10865/I" and "Munich Fog (Fogfall) #10865/II" at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany. 2018 : Praemium Imperial Award in Sculpture, Japan Art Association 2023 : Wolf Prize in Arts

Other notable achievements 1979-1998 : lecturer at Nihon University for the Department of Cinema, College of Arts 1989: "System/apparatus for making a cloud sculpture from water-fog" Patent #1502386 2017: Author Dan Brown, in the novel Origin (Brown novel), refers to the work of Nakaya as his character Robert Langdon visits the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain in search of former student Edmond Kirsch. Noting that the fog sculpture constantly changes shape, Brown uses the setting to create an ethereal and dramatic scene as Langdon enters the Guggenheim museum.