Opening. Fujiko Nakaya: Veil

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. Although her work has been primarily based in Japan, Nakaya studied at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, from 1954 to 1957, and later became an instrumental figure in the rise of video art in Japan.

In the late 1960s, Nakaya became involved with the activities of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), the organization founded by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver. She participated unofficially as a performer in Deborah Hay’s Solo in 1966, and officially joined E.A.T. in 1969 as the Japanese coordinator for the Pepsi Pavilion project at Osaka’s EXPO ’70. As part of the pavilion’s multisensory expanded art experiments, Nakaya created the world’s first fog sculpture, enveloping the exterior of the Pepsi Pavilion in a vaporous mist composed of extremely fine water droplets that interacted with local atmospheric conditions.

Nakaya has since 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 also 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.

Alongside her pioneering work with fog, Nakaya played a central role in the development of video art in Japan. She was a co-founder and key organizer of Video Hiroba, coordinating equipment access for the group’s first exhibition at the Sony Building in 1972. Fluent in English and closely connected to E.A.T., she became an important point of contact between the US and Japanese art scenes. She also produced the first Japanese translation of Michael Shamberg’s alternative media manual Guerrilla Television, and founded Video Gallery SCAN in Harajuku, which from 1980 to 1992 exhibited works by both Japanese and international artists, including Bill Viola, New York’s DCTV, founded by Keiko Tsuno, and Nam June Paik. Nakaya also participated in various video art exhibitions in New York and elsewhere, including the seminal Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto at MoMA in 1979, curated by Barbara London.

As an active video artist herself, Nakaya’s work has often addressed both natural and social ecologies. In her representative early work Friends of Minamata Victims — Video Diary (1972), she filmed a sit-in in front of the Chisso Corporation headquarters, where demonstrators were protesting the company’s mercury pollution of local waters. By playing the video back immediately to the protesters, Nakaya used the medium to heighten their awareness of the impact of their own actions.

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 spaces through which the public moves.