Fujiko Nakaya

Fujiko Nakaya

Nakaya's Fog Sculpture #08025 "F.O.G.," Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain
Born 1933
Sapporo, Japan
Nationality Japanese

Fujiko Nakaya (中谷 芙二子, Nakaya Fujiko, born 1933) is a Japanese artist, most noted for her fog sculptures.

Early life and education

Nakaya was born in Sapporo in 1933, where her father Ukichiro 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, and was also an accomplished sumi-e artist.

She went to high school in Tokyo, graduating from Japan Women's University High School. After high school, she came to the United States to pursue a degree at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA.[1] She graduated from Northwestern with a Bachelor of Arts in 1957 and went on to study painting in Paris and Madrid up until 1959.[2]

Career

After spending some time in Europe, Nakaya returned to Japan in 1960, showing her oil paintings in a two person show at the Sherman Art Gallery in Chicago (1960) and later attaining her first solo exhibition featuring twelve of her paintings at the Tokyo Gallery (1962).[2]

Nakaya first gained prominence through participating in American art collective Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) created in 1967. She became the Tokyo representative for the group in 1969 which gave her the platform to create the world's first atmospheric fog sculpture for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. She has since established many other fog installations at galleries worldwide, including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.[3]

She opened Japan's first video art gallery named Video Gallery SCAN by friend, collaborator, video artist Bill Viola in Harajuku, in 1980.[4] The gallery sponsored twice annual competitions for new works by artists, thus becoming a platform for promising new video artists to display their work. In 1987, Nakaya organized the Japan International Video Television Festival at Spiral in Tokyo.

In 2002 she acted as a consultant to architects Diller + Scofidio on Blur Building created for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchâtel inYverdonles-Bains. According to the pair, Nakaya thought their original idea unachievable, but "it was her idea about irregular nozzle concentrations that saved the day."[5]

She has received numerous awards including the Australian Cultural Award, the Laser d’Or at the Locarno International Video Festival, the Yoshida Isoya Special Award, the Minister for Posts and Telecommunications Award for artistic contribution to HDTV programming and the Special Achievement Prize at the 2008 Japan Media Arts Festival [1]

Fog Sculpture #94925 "Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere," Sculpture Garden, Australian National Gallery, Canberra

Works

Awards[2]

Other notable achievements

References

  1. 1 2
  2. 1 2 3 "Anarchive n°5 - FUJIKO NAKAYA 中谷 芙二子 FOG 霧 BROUILLARD". anarchive.net.
  3. ↑ "| Exploratorium". Exploratorium. 2013-04-04. Retrieved 2017-03-09.
  4. ↑ Birnbaum, Alfred. "Japan video." Mediamatic Magazine vol. 3 # 1 (1988).
  5. ↑ Phillips, Patricia C. (2004). "A Parallax Practice: A Conversation with Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.". Art Journal. 63: 62–79. ISSN 0004-3249 – via ProQuest.
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