Fujiko Nakaya

Fujiko Nakaya (b.1933, Sapporo) was an instrumental figure in the rise of video art in Japan. Her work has been primarily based in Japan, but she attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois from 1954-1957 and has worked on various video art exhibits in New York and elsewhere, including the seminal "Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto" at MoMA in 1979, curated by Barbara London.

Nakaya became involved with the activities of Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver’s organization Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.) in the late 1960s, unofficially as a performer in Deborah Hay’s Solo in 1966, but officially in 1969 as the Japanese coordinator for the Pepsi Pavilion project at Osaka’s EXPO ‘70. As a part of the Pepsi Pavilion’s multisensory expanded art experiments, Nakaya created her first fog sculpture which enveloped the exterior of the pavilion in mist of water droplets that would interact with local atmospheric conditions. Nakaya was also a co-founder and key organizer of Video Hiroba, and coordinated the scheduling of equipment access for the group’s first exhibition at the Sony Building in 1972. She was also a key point of contact between the US and Japanese art scenes given her fluency in English and connections to E.A.T. . She produced the first Japanese translation of Michael Shamberg's alternative media manual Guerrilla Television, and founded the Video Gallery SCAN in Harajuku, which from 1980-1992 exhibited works by both Japanese and international artists, including Bill Viola, New York's DCTV (founded by Keiko Tsuno), and Nam June Paik.

An active video artist herself, Nakaya's work was often concerned with both natural and social ecologies. In her representative early work, Friends of Minamata Victims - Video Diary (1972), Nakaya filmed a sit-in in front of the Chisso Corporation headquarters where demonstrators were protesting the company's water pollution with mercury, playing the video back immediately to the protesters to raise their awareness of the impact of their own actions. 

Image: Brotherton-Lock, Courtesy of Tate, copyright Fujiko Nakaya