Fine Art

Fujiko Nakaya & Mee Industries: Sculpting with Fog for Over 50 Years

A fog-covered architectural pavilion suspended over a lake, with a long bridge walkway leading into a cloud-like structure—the Blur Building at Swiss Expo 2002.

Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculptures are dynamic installations that interact with their surroundings, changing in form and density based on weather conditions. These works encourage viewers to engage directly with the environment, blurring the lines between art and nature.

Art Installations

Collaboration Highlights

A large geodesic dome, partially obscured by mist, stands beside a metallic orb in a grassy area, suggesting a futuristic structure.

From Expo ’70 to the Champs-Élysées

For over half a century, Mee Industries has proudly engineered the fog systems that bring renowned Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya visionary fog sculptures to life. Since their groundbreaking collaboration at the 1970 Osaka Expo, Nakaya’s artistic imagination and MeeFog’s innovative engineering have combined to transform public spaces around the world into dynamic, immersive experiences that blur the boundaries between art, nature, and technology.

In the late 1960s, Fujiko Nakaya was invited by the art collective Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) to contribute to the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka. She envisioned enveloping the pavilion in a natural, water-based fog, moving away from the chemical fog that were commonly used at the time. To bring her vision to life, she collaborated with engineer and cloud physicist Thomas Mee Jr., the founder of Mee Industries, who had developed fog systems for agricultural purposes.

Over more than five decades, Nakaya’s poetic vision and MeeFog’s precision engineering have turned pure water into living sculpture—an art-and-technology partnership still evolving today. Highlights include a permanent Fog Sculpture at the Guggenheim Bilbao and a mist-shrouded installation on Paris’s Champs-Élysées for Nuit Blanche 2013.