Fujiko Nakaya

Fujiko Nakaya (b. 1933, Sapporo, Hokkaido) is the second daughter of physicist Ukichiro Nakaya, whose foundational research on snow and ice is world famous. After graduating from high school in Tokyo, Nakaya attended North-western University in Evanston, Illinois, where she studied art. From 1957 to 1959, Nakaya studied painting in Paris and Madrid.

In 1960, her paintings were shown at the Sherman Art Gallery in Chicago. She returned to Japan, where she had her first solo exhibition at Tokyo Gallery in 1962. In 1966, Nakaya participated in the renowned performance project 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering in New York and joined the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), founded that same year by Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Whitman, and Robert Rauschenberg.

E.A.T. brought engineers and artists together for joint projects, accelerating the trend toward multimedia in art. From 1969, Nakaya was E.A.T.’s representative in Tokyo and was instrumental in the design of the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka. It was here that she first worked with artificial fog, creating a large-scale atmospheric sculpture that enveloped the exterior of the building.

Since then, often in collaboration with other artists and scientists, Nakaya has created a variety of fog sculptures for public spaces, buildings, and parks. Together with Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Yoshiaki Tono, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Hakudo Kobayashi, and others, Nakaya founded the artist collective Video Hiroba in 1971. In 1980, Nakaya opened SCAN, Japan’s first video gallery.