fujiko nakaya’s fog sculpture returns to berlin’s neue nationalgalerie

fujiko nakaya’s fog fills neue nationalgalerie’s sculpture garden

Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya returns to Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie with a site-specific fog sculpture that occupies the museum’s 90-meter-long sculpture garden through October 25th, 2026. Activated throughout the day, the installation sends slowly moving clouds of pure water mist across the garden, where they drift between trees, sculptures, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s landmark architecture before dissipating into the air.

Few artists have worked with atmosphere as consistently as Nakaya. Since developing her first fog sculpture for Expo ’70 in Osaka, she has treated weather as a sculptural medium, giving temporary form to something that usually escapes perception. Her installations never settle into a fixed composition. Wind, humidity, temperature, and the movement of visitors continually alter their shape, making every activation slightly different from the last.

At the Neue Nationalgalerie, this relationship becomes especially charged. Completed in 1968, Mies van der Rohe’s transparent steel-and-glass museum has long been celebrated for its precise geometry and visual clarity. Nakaya introduces an element that temporarily interrupts those qualities. As fog rolls across the sculpture garden, familiar views disappear and reappear, distances become uncertain, and the building shifts between sharp definition and near invisibility.

all images courtesy of Neue Nationalgalerie

a practice that treats weather as sculpture

The installation, curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti, with Nikola Richolt serving as assistant curator, fills the entire length of the sculpture garden. Fog emerges from opposite sides at regular intervals, gradually converging toward the center before lifting into the sky. Sometimes it forms dense, almost solid masses. Moments later it thins into a translucent veil, revealing fragments of the surrounding landscape and sculptures by Henri Laurens, Wolfgang Mattheuer, and Alicja Kwade.

The museum offers multiple ways to experience the work. The collection galleries overlook the garden through the building’s expansive glass facade, turning the changing atmosphere into a constantly evolving backdrop. Audiences can also enter the garden itself, moving through the fog as visibility contracts and expands with every shift in wind and moisture.

Nakaya’s practice offers an early example of atmosphere becoming architecture’s active partner instead of its backdrop. The work has no permanent form, no fixed outline, and no final image. It exists only through continuous exchange between technology, weather, landscape, and the people moving through it.

fog moves between the museum’s permanent sculptures and landscape