Fujiko Nakaya: Fog Sculpture in the Sculpture Garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie

Nakaya's fog sculpture plays monumentally and ephemerally with Mies van der Rohe's iconic architecture and opens up an intense dialogue between visitors and their immediate surroundings.


Nakaya’s fog sculptures transcend traditional boundaries of sculpture by creating fleeting, borderless transformations that involve the audience and give atmospheric conditions a sculptural form. Her works invite visitors to engage with natural elements in real time—through site-specific, ephemeral experiences that blur the lines between nature and artistic expression.

For the Neue Nationalgalerie, Nakaya has developed a new installation in 2025 that fills the entire sculpture garden. At regular intervals, different fog formations emerge from selected sides of the garden, blending with the trees and the permanent sculptures by Henri Laurens, Wolfgang Mattheuer, and Alicja Kwade, before slowly dissolving into the sky from the center of the garden. The moving fog appears in varying densities—at times as a nearly tangible volume, at others as a translucent veil.

The Neue Nationalgalerie’s iconic architecture, designed by Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1968—just two years before Nakaya’s first fog sculpture—offers multiple vantage points from which to experience her work. The 90-meter-long glass façade on the museum’s collection level provides an impressive view of the ever-changing fog formations from inside. Visitors can also step directly into the garden from the collection area and immerse themselves in the fog.

The fog sculpture is activated for approximately 10 minutes every hour between 11 am and 5 pm. On Thursdays, it is activated hourly between 11 am and 7 pm.


The Artist Fujiko Nakaya

Fujiko Nakaya was born in 1933 in Sapporo, Japan. In the 1960s, she gained recognition as a member of the New York-based collective Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), and later achieved international acclaim for her immersive fog sculptures. Her first fog sculpture was created for the Expo World’s Fair in Osaka in 1970, using a system that generates pure water fog.
Nakaya has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Praemium Imperiale (2018), the Australian Cultural Award (1976), the Special Prize of the Isoya Yoshida Award (1993), the Merit Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival (2008), the French Order Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (2017), the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award (2020), the Person of Cultural Merit honor (2022), and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon (2024). She has been a member of the Japan Art Academy since 2023. Important exhibitions of her work have been held at Pong Ta Long, Thailand (2025), the Fondation Beyeler and the LUMA Foundation (2024–25), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2019), among others.

Curatorial Team
The exhibition is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and Lisa Botti, Curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie. Assistant curator: Nikola Richolt.


The exhibition is made possible by Birgit and Thomas Rabe.

A special exhibition by the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin