Fujiko Nakaya fills Paris Bourse de Commerce with artificial fog installation

Entitled Cloud #07156, this Fog Sculpture takes the form of a thick white cloud made of water vapour that enters into dialogue with Tadao Ando’s architecture.

PARIS.— Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya (born 1933) has taken over the Rotonde de la Bourse de Commerce to create a new work, specially designed for the exhibition "Clair-obscur". Entitled Cloud #07156, this Fog Sculpture takes the form of a thick white cloud made of water vapour that enters into dialogue with Tadao Ando’s architecture.

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Beneath the Rotonde’s skylight dome, Fujiko Nakaya (born in 1933 in Sapporo, Japan) presents one of her Fog Sculptures shaped by shifts in the air and the movement of visitors. The installation, with its uncertain contours and perpetual motion, resonates with the leitmotif of the "Fog" section presented in Gallery 6, which depicts a deserted landscape, inhabited only by wisps of mist and mirages, where a form of the sublime endures: Trisha Donnelly’s abstract oscillations, Bruce Conner’s clouds of nuclear explosions, Frank Bowling’s misty, dissolving map, and Wolfgang Tillmans’ landscapes suspended between shadow and light echo the appearance of Fujiko Nakaya’s fog.

For the Japanese artist, fog has the unique quality of rendering invisible what is ordinarily visible — in this case, the space itself — whilst revealing what usually escapes our perception, such as the movement of air. The fog materialises the space itself, affirming that it is not empty. The work also highlights architecture as an interval — the Japanese concept of ma — a space of relationship between beings and things where there is never any question of emptiness, but rather of pointing to space as the zone of connection between the beings that inhabit the world.

Viewing her work as a "conversation" with natural elements over which she has no control, particularly the wind, Nakaya artificially recreates the natural composition of fog using a system of pumps and nozzles that spray water in the form of microparticles. Thus, Cloud #07156, created specifically for the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce, is part of the legacy of this project. To create the fog, Nakaya employs a unique technique: "I use high-pressure pumps and diffusers. The pressurised water emerges through a tiny hole in the nozzle and strikes a needle positioned above it. The water then breaks up into droplets twenty or thirty microns in diameter, the same size as those that make up natural fog," she explains. The artist is interested here in creating a fog with the same characteristics as that which occurs naturally, but by artificial means.

Fujiko Nakaya says that her Fog Sculptures could also be described as "atmospheric sculptures". Comparing her works to "conversations with the wind", the artist views her work as a dialogue between the mist she creates and the conditions of its display — the wind outside, the flow of air and the movement of the public inside — conceiving the artwork not as an object, but as a shifting experience, reflecting the impact of time and space on the sculpture.

Usually installed outdoors, these ‘fog sculptures’ have been adapted by the artist for museum spaces on several occasions. This precise anchoring in space is evident in the title of the work, Cloud #07156: the number refers to one of the weather stations closest to the Bourse de Commerce, making this artificial cloud a strange counterpart to the clouds that drift above us.

Fujiko Nakaya’s work also enters into a dialogue with Tadao Ando’s concrete cylinder. Ando, too, regards his work as "the search for a state in which [architecture and nature] coexist, whilst clashing violently"¹. Viewing architecture as the creation of a place, Tadao Ando seeks to "create structures where the transience of nature and the passage of time are transformed into a personal experience of space"². The wall he has erected inside the Bourse de Commerce becomes a stage for the sun’s passage through the Rotunda, the shifting light bearing witness to the arrival of summer within the building. Its cylinder, which in a sense forms an oculus, conceals as much as it reveals the architecture that precedes it. By allowing a natural phenomenon to burst into a human-made structure, Nakaya’s fog sculpture highlights the fundamental qualities of Tadao Ando’s design.

¹ Tadao Ando. Pensées sur l’Architecture et le Paysage, Paris, Arléa, 1999, p. 136.
² Ibid., p. 154.