Fujiko Nakaya was born in Sapporo, Japan, in 1933. Her father, Ukichiro Nakaya, a physicist credited with creating the first artificial snowflakes, influenced her work, and as a young art student, she became interested in working with cloud-like forms. In 1970, at the Osaka World Expo in Japan, Nakaya created the world's first fog sculpture when she enveloped the Pepsi Pavilion in a vaporous mist, in collaboration with the renowned Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).
Nakaya has created fog installations all over the world, including projects for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Grand Palais in Paris, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco, among others. She was a consultant to the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the Blur Building for the 2002 Swiss Expo, and has worked with numerous artists (including Trisha Brown, David Tudor, and Bill Viola) in music and performance settings.
A leading figure in contemporary Japanese art for the past fifty years, Fujiko Nakaya has built a reputation for her fog sculptures, works composed of clouds of extremely fine droplets that significantly but ephemerally transform the space in which the public moves.
