Fujiko Nakaya | |
|---|---|
 Nakaya's Fog Sculpture #08025 "F.O.G.," Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain | |
| Born | (1933-05-15)15 May 1933 (age 92) |
Fujiko Nakaya (中谷 芙二子,Nakaya Fujiko; born 15 May 1933) is a Japanese artist, a member ofExperiments in Art and Technology, and a promoter, supporter, and practitioner of Japanese video art. She is best known for herfog sculptures.
Nakaya was born inSapporo in 1933, where her fatherUkichirō Nakaya, who is credited with making the first artificial snowflakes, was at the time an assistant professor atHokkaido University. Her father later produced a number of documentary films and radio programs and foundedIwanami Productions, a producer of documentary and educational films. Ukichirō Nakaya was also an accomplishedsumi-e artist, and in 1960 his ink paintings were shown alongside Fujiko Nakaya's oil paintings in an exhibition at Sherman Gallery in Chicago.[1] In recent years exhibitions atOslo Kunstforening andLe Forum at Ginza Maison Hermès have illustrated the influence of Ukichiro Nakaya's ideas and scientific practice on Fujiko Nakaya's artmaking.
Fujiko Nakaya went to high school in Tokyo, graduating from Japan Women's University High School. After high school, she went to the United States to pursue a degree atNorthwestern University inEvanston, Illinois, USA.[2] She graduated from Northwestern with a Bachelor of Arts in 1957 and went on to study painting in Paris and Madrid up until 1959.[3]
After spending some time in Europe where she briefly studied withLeonard Foujita (akaFūjita Tsuguharu), Nakaya returned to Japan in 1960. She exhibited her oil paintings in the two-person show with her father at the Sherman Art Gallery inChicago (1960) followed by her first solo exhibition, featuring twelve paintings, atTokyo Gallery (1962).[3]
Nakaya first gained prominence through her participation in the American art collectiveExperiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), founded in 1967. Nakaya had first performed with E.A.T. as a remote-control operator forDeborah Hay's performance workSolo for9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering in 1966, but did not officially join the group until she became the Tokyo representative for E.A.T. in 1969.[4] She was invited byBilly Klüver, at the suggestion ofRobert Rauschenberg (for whom she had translated during his 1964 performance at theSōgetsu Art Center[5]) to create a fog sculpture for the Pepsi Pavilion atExpo '70 in Osaka.[4] While the invitation did not require a specific kind of fog, Nakaya was concerned a chemical fog would limit who could participate in the work, so she took the opportunity to design the world's first water-based atmospheric fog sculpture with the help of engineer Thomas Mee.[6][7] Nakaya considered nature to be a collaborator in this project, so she and Mee conducted a number of tests to see how the natural conditions of the site might shape the fog. They conducted tests of the output of various atomizing devices, wind tunnel tests of models of the pavilion, and studies of the wind patterns at the Pepsi Pavilion site in Osaka.[4] The fog sculpture became recognized as one of the signature projects of the Pepsi Pavilion, and the fog system was patented by both Mee (hardware) and Nakaya (airflow) after Expo '70.[7] Nakaya has since established many other fog installations at galleries worldwide, including theAustralian National Gallery, Canberra and theGuggenheim Museum Bilbao.[8]
AfterExpo '70, Nakaya continued working as a part ofExperiments in Art and Technology by establishing the Tokyo branch of E.A.T. with Kobayashi Hakudō and Morioka Yūji. Their first project was the Tokyo node of the projectUtopia Q&A, 1981 that ran from July 30 to September 30, 1971 at theFuji Xerox showroom in theSony Building, Ginza.[4] The Tokyo terminal was connected to terminals inNew York,Stockholm, andAhmedabad bytelex, and over the course of August, 1971, the four terminals traded messages predicting what the world might be like ten years into the future, in 1981. This telex network was organized on the occasion of the exhibitionUtopias & Visions 1871-1981 at theModerna Museet in Stockholm, curated byPontus Hultén for the hundredth anniversary of theParis Commune.[9][4] However, the Tokyo terminal of this project had the most developed administrative structure of all the nodes, both because it required a translation team to translate incoming messages into Japanese and outgoing ones into English, and because E.A.T. Tokyo had organized the participation of a number of well known media and cultural figures including manga artist and animatorTezuka Osamu, scientistOda Minoru, and composerIchiyanagi Toshi.[4]
Since the 1970s, Nakaya has been a key figure of the video art scene in Japan, often serving as a conduit between North American and Japanese art practitioners. She first embarked on video at the invitation of Canadian video artist Michael Goldberg, and she worked withKatsuhiro Yamaguchi to organize the first exhibition of video art in Japan,Video Communication: Do-It-Yourself-Kit at theSony Building, Ginza, in 1972.[4][3][10] She was a central member of the video collectiveVideo Hiroba that formed on the occasion of this show, and worked on both community collaborative projects and individual video sculptures from the 1970s through the 1990s. Her works have often been cited as examples ofVideo Hiroba's oeuvre, including her 1972 pieceFriends of Minamata Victims—Video Diary and her 1973 interactive installationOld People's Wisdom —CulturalDNA.[10][11][12] Yet beyond making video works, she also translated texts on video and promoted Japanese artists abroad. In 1974 she published a Japanese translation ofMichael Shamberg'sGuerilla Television, through Bijutsu Shuppansha, and translated other texts for the magazineBijutsu Techō.[4] Nakaya also representedVideo Hiroba for the Matrix Festival, Vancouver, in 1973 and assistedBarbara London with organizing theMuseum of Modern Art's 1979 exhibition of Japanese video art,Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto.[13][14]
In 1980 Nakaya opened Japan's first video art gallery inHarajuku. The gallery was namedVideo Gallery SCAN by her friend and collaborator, video artistBill Viola.[15] The gallery sponsored semiannual competitions for new works by artists, thus becoming a platform for promising new video artists to display their work. It also presented solo exhibitions through a series called SCAN FOCUS. Notable FOCUS exhibitions featuredBill Viola,DCTV,Nam June Paik, Norio Imai, andMako Idemitsu.[4] Video Gallery SCAN also organized the Japan International Video Television Festival atSpiral in Tokyo in 1987, 1989, and 1993. The festivals featured both new and established artists, including work byGeneral Idea,Shigeko Kubota,Dara Birnbaum,Peter Callas,Gary Hill,Dumb Type, andMarina Abromavic, among others. It also experimented with live satellite broadcasting, presented video sculptures, and introduced new works from artists in the Philippines, Thailand, and China.[4]
Nakaya's fog works have dominated her practice since the closing of Video Gallery SCAN in 1992. In an interview on April 27, 2014 with Irene Shum Allen, Nakaya explained that she doesn't directly create images with her fog sculptures, instead the fog is a kind of transducer that reacts to the local meteorological conditions. She commented that the landscape can appear to be largely static until fog is introduced. With the introduction of fog, nature's stories and information are made more accessible to the observer.[16] Artist and art criticKenjirō Okazaki has written extensively on Nakaya's work, and ties her fog works to the work of her father, scientistUkichirō Nakaya.Okazaki likens Fujiko Nakaya's interest in video and fog to her father's use of photography and film to record snow and atmospheric conditions,[3] and relatesUkichirō Nakaya's ethics of documenting nature in its imperfection—even photographing the "ugly" snow crystals left out ofWilson Bentley's collections—to Fujiko Nakaya's interest in contingent processes rather than completed objects in both her video and fog practices.[17]Okazaki links the indeterminacy of Nakaya's fog and video works through the idea of medium:
The notion of “freedom” is conditioned by such behavior of medium. Therefore, the devotion to medium found in Fujiko Nakaya’s works fundamentally contradicts with artworks posited as forms of expression (these are bound to be regulated as deterministic tautology, stuck in the repetition of the same). What her works instead reveal is the force that transcends and overflows all forms of regulation: the behavior of medium, which is the absolute condition for “freedom” in this world (along with our “free will”).[18]
When working in fog, Nakaya often collaborates with other creators, including video artistBill Viola, light artistShiro Takatani, dancersTrisha Brown andMin Tanaka, and musicianRyūichi Sakamoto. In 1992 Nakaya collaborated withAtsushi Kitagawara Architects to create a playground in which dense fog envelops visitors twice each hour at Showa Kinen Park in Tokyo.[19] Visitors experience the sense of being lost as the fog develops and being found again as the fog dissipates. The work is intended to evoke a reverence for nature and a reminder of the cycle of life and death.[20] In 2002 Nakaya acted as a consultant to architectsDiller + Scofidio onBlur BuildingArchived 2017-03-12 at theWayback Machine, created for the Swiss Expo 2002 onLake Neuchâtel inYverdon-les-Bains. According to the pair, Nakaya thought their original idea unachievable, but "it was her idea about irregular nozzle concentrations that saved the day."[21]
Nakaya 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[2] Nakaya was awarded thePraemium Imperiale award in sculpture from the Japan Art Association in 2018. The first large-scale retrospective of Nakaya's work was held atArt Tower Mito in Japan from October, 2018 through January 2019. The first retrospective outside Japan followed from April 2022 through July 2022 in Munich, Germany.[22]
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