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Some sculptures stand still. Fujiko Nakaya’s do the opposite. They drift, gather, dissolve, thicken, vanish, and return, making the air itself feel like a living material.
At the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris, the Japanese artist brings that unstable magic into the museum’s central Rotunda with Cloud #07156, a monumental fog sculpture on view from June 4 to September 14, 2026. Presented as part of Clair-obscur, the work fills the circular space with shifting vapour, light, and movement, transforming the building into something less architectural and more atmospheric.
Nakaya is widely recognised as the pioneer of fog sculpture, a practice she has developed for more than half a century. Rather than carve, cast, or assemble, she works with water, humidity, air currents, and the presence of bodies moving through space. The result is sculpture without a fixed body: an artwork that changes depending on weather, temperature, breath, circulation, and time.
Inside the Rotunda, the fog does not simply decorate the architecture. It interrupts it. The mist moves through Tadao Ando’s circular interior, concealing and revealing details as visitors pass through. One moment, the space opens up. The next, it disappears. Visibility becomes unstable, and the museum starts to feel like a place caught between presence and erasure.
The technology behind the work is precise, but the effect feels almost supernatural. Nakaya uses high-pressure pumpsand specially engineered nozzles to release microscopic droplets of pure water, creating a non-chemical fog that behaves like a natural cloud. Her first fog project was created with engineer Thomas Mee for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, launching a body of work that now spans around one hundred installations worldwide.