16 Facts About Fujiko Nakaya

Fujiko Nakaya is a Japanese artist, a member of Experiments in Art and Technology, and a promoter, supporter, and practitioner of Japanese video art.

Fujiko Nakaya went to high school in Tokyo, graduating from Japan Women's University High School.

Fujiko Nakaya graduated from Northwestern with a Bachelor of Arts in 1957 and went on to study painting in Paris and Madrid up until 1959.

Fujiko Nakaya exhibited her oil paintings in the two-person show with her father at the Sherman Art Gallery in Chicago followed by her first solo exhibition, featuring twelve paintings, at Tokyo Gallery.

Fujiko Nakaya was invited by Billy Kluver, at the suggestion of Robert Rauschenberg to create a fog sculpture for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka.

Fujiko 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.

Fujiko Nakaya has since established many other fog installations at galleries worldwide, including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Since the 1970s, Fujiko 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.

Fujiko Nakaya first embarked on video at the invitation of Canadian video artist Michael Goldberg, and she worked with Katsuhiro Yamaguchi to organize the first exhibition of video art in Japan, Video Communication: Do-It-Yourself-Kit at the Sony Building, Ginza, in 1972.

Fujiko Nakaya was a central member of the video collective Video 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.

Fujiko Nakaya represented Video Hiroba for the Matrix Festival, Vancouver, in 1973 and assisted Barbara London with organizing the Museum of Modern Art's 1979 exhibition of Japanese video art, Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto.

In 1980 Fujiko Nakaya opened Japan's first video art gallery in Harajuku.

Fujiko Nakaya commented that the landscape can appear to be largely static until fog is introduced.

In 1992 Fujiko Nakaya collaborated with Atsushi Kitagawara Architects to create a playground in which dense fog envelops visitors twice each hour at Showa Kinen Park in Tokyo.

Fujiko 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 Fujiko Nakaya was awarded the Praemium Imperiale award in sculpture from the Japan Art Association in 2018.

The first large-scale retrospective of Fujiko Nakaya's work was held at Art Tower Mito in Japan from October, 2018 through January 2019.