Fujiko Nakaya
Fujiko Nakaya (15 May 1933, Sapporo) is a Japanese visual artist. Before she began her painting career, Fujiko Nakaya studied at the High School of Japan Women’s University in Tokyo and at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (1954-1957). Her first solo exhibition was held at the Tokyo Gallery in 1962.
Her work took an important turn in 1966, when she joined the Experiments in Art and Technology collective of artists and engineers (EAT) founded by Billy Klüver – who would later advise her in the technical development of her work – a collective for which she became the Tokyo representative, in 1969. On the occasion of the Osaka Expo ’70 and construction of the Pepsi pavilion, Fujiko Nakaya surrounded the outside of the building with her first artificial fog sculpture (Fog Sculpture #47773). Since then, she has developed immersive and unstable environments, making her a pioneer of the genre.
With these artificial environments, created using a technical device that sprays billions of droplets of water from a nozzle system, the artist seeks to reproduce the effect of natural fog. To this end, Fujiko Nakaya uses air and wind-inspired dynamics to make her work as similar as possible to natural occurrences. Starting in the 1970s, the artist began to envision these ever-changing outdoor works as pieces to be experienced to their fullest potential. Her fog sculptures became shared spaces for a variety of collaborations, such as with David Tudor in 1974 – Fog Environment for David Tudor Concert (Project) – on Knavelskär Island, Sweden; with Trisha Brown in 1980 for the choreography Opal Loop, during which she designed her first indoor fog as a setting for dancers; or that same year for a Bill Viola improvised concert in the Ojika River Valley in Japan (Fog Sculpture/Performance #47690). The number used in the title always matches the international code of the weather station where the piece is set up. (2018)
Fujiko Nakaya was also an instrumental figure in the rise of video art in Japan. She was a co-founder and key organizer of Video Hiroba, and coordinated the scheduling of equipment access for the group’s first exhibition at the Sony Building in 1972. She was also a key point of contact between the US and Japanese art scenes given her fluency in English and connections to E.A.T. . She produced the first Japanese translation of Michael Shamberg's alternative media manual Guerrilla Television, and founded the Video Gallery SCAN in Harajuku, which from 1980-1992 exhibited works by both Japanese and international artists, including Bill Viola, New York's DCTV (founded by Keiko Tsuno), and Nam June Paik.
An active video artist herself, Nakaya's work was often concerned with both natural and social ecologies. In her representative early work, Friends of Minamata Victims - Video Diary (1972), Nakaya filmed a sit-in in front of the Chisso Corporation headquarters where demonstrators were protesting the company's water pollution with mercury, playing the video back immediately to the protesters to raise their awareness of the impact of their own actions. [1]
- Links
- Collab Japan
- AWARE
- Retrospective, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2022
- Wikipedia
