Fujiko Nakaya

Fujiko Nakaya studied at Northwestern University. The recorded working language is Japanese. The field of work recorded is installation art and art of sculpture. Works named in the authority record are Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.O.G.). Work by Fujiko Nakaya is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Distinctions recorded are Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Praemium Imperiale and Wolf Prize in Arts.

• Name — Fujiko Nakaya • Born — 15 May 1933 • Birthplace — Sapporo, Japan • Known for — Fog sculptures

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.

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).

Nakaya first gained prominence through her participation in the American art collective Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), founded in 1967. Nakaya had first performed with E.A.T. as a remote-control operator for Deborah Hay's performance work Solo for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering in 1966, but did not officially join the group until she became the Tokyo representative for E.A.T. in 1969. She was invited by Billy Klüver, at the suggestion of Robert Rauschenberg (for whom she had translated during his 1964 performance at the Sōgetsu Art Center) to create a fog sculpture for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. While the invitation did not require a specific kind of fog, Nakaya was concerned a chemical fog would limit who could participate in the work, so she took the opportunity to design the world's first water-based atmospheric fog sculpture with the help of engineer Thomas Mee. 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. The fog sculpture became recognized as one of the signature projects of the Pepsi Pavilion, and the fog system was patented by both Mee (hardware) and Nakaya (airflow) after Expo '70. Nakaya has since established many other fog installations at galleries worldwide, including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. 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. However, the Tokyo terminal of this project had the most developed administrative structure of all the nodes, both because it required a translation team to translate incoming messages into Japanese and outgoing ones into English, and because E.A.T. Tokyo had organized the participation of a number of well known media and cultural figures including manga artist and animator Tezuka Osamu, scientist Oda Minoru, and composer Ichiyanagi Toshi.

Since the 1970s, Nakaya has been a key figure of the video art scene in Japan, often serving as a conduit between North American and Japanese art practitioners. She first embarked on video at the invitation of Canadian video artist Michael Goldberg, and she worked with Katsuhiro Yamaguchi to organize the first exhibition of video art in Japan, Video Communication: Do-It-Yourself-Kit at the Sony Building, Ginza, in 1972. 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. Nakaya also represented Video Hiroba for the Matrix Festival, Vancouver, in 1973 and assisted Barbara London with organizing the Museum of Modern Art's 1979 exhibition of Japanese video art, Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto. 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. Video Gallery SCAN also organized the Japan International Video Television Festival at Spiral in Tokyo in 1987, 1989, and 1993. The festivals featured both new and established artists, including work by General Idea, Shigeko Kubota, Dara Birnbaum, Peter Callas, Gary Hill, Dumb Type, and Marina Abromavic, among others. It also experimented with live satellite broadcasting, presented video sculptures, and introduced new works from artists in the Philippines, Thailand, and China.

• 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.

• 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.

Fujiko Nakaya is recorded as having received Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Praemium Imperiale and Wolf Prize in Arts. Recognition and collections. Nakaya received Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Praemium Imperiale and Wolf Prize in Arts.