Nature has moved into Munich's Haus der Kunst: dense wafts of mist billow in its halls, sink into still pools of water or move through wide-open portals into the English Garden, to where the Eisbach rushes.
And if you enter the building from here, from the east side, which is currently possible, you will be enveloped in the falling mists of the "Munich Fog (Fogfall)" created by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya especially for her Munich retrospective, the first outside of Japan .
Inside, the visitor is then surrounded by the monotonous chanting of Zen monks reciting sutras from the three-channel video "Soji-ji", which applies to the individual breathing rhythm of the individual while at the same time flowing unison of the singing and is shown here for the first time since its creation in 1979.
The large central hall has been transformed into a pool of water from which a cloud of white fog suddenly rises and falls;
in no time it veils the audience wandering around and across on a wooden plank, feeling their way through this weather in amazement.
“Fog makes visible things invisible,” says the artist, “while invisible things become visible like the wind,” or like the air currents that trigger people's movements in the fog.
Anyone who hears the cheering of the schoolchildren, who were able to enjoy the swathes before all other visitors, will agree with Andrea Lissoni, the director of the Haus der Kunst: "Art is for the future," he says, and that the youngest of society are the most important are.
This is entirely in the spirit of the artist,
who installed one of their most beautiful fog machines in the "Children's Park" of a national park in Tokyo.
Nakaya was born in Sapporo in 1933, studied art in Illinois, Paris and Madrid and lives in Tokyo.
She began painting reminiscent of cell accumulations or mycelium, announcing her interest in natural processes, which she expanded to include the goal of uniting man and nature.
Family element art
Pumps force pure water through thin tubes with stainless steel nozzles, at the openings of which it is split into the tiniest droplets;
Nakaya uses atomizers, similar to those used in greenhouses, and she doesn't hide these fog makers, because romantic aspects, such as German songs, poems and pictures looking for them in the fog, don't play a role for her.
Because the artist takes a more sober approach to her subject, no matter how magical it may seem, influenced by her father, the experimental physicist Ukichiro Nakaya, who was the first in the world to produce artificial snowflakes.
Working with a natural phenomenon was not so far off, and for each of her fog installations the artist collects meteorological data on humidity, temperatures and wind conditions.
In 1966 she joined the group EAT - Experiments in Art and Technology - the pioneering association of artists around Robert Rauschenberg and scientists around Billy Klüver, which innovatively combined art and the latest technology for both sides.
With people from EAT, Nakaya created her first large fog sculpture for the Pepsi Pavilion at the Osaka World's Fair in 1970. The work was in line with the trend of an era in which ecological thinking suddenly played a central role and art became social, interactive and worked more experimentally than ever before: aspects that, given the precarious situation of the earth today, the Haus der Kunst will reflect on, said Lissoni, when he presented his reorientation of the house, with much talk of "transparency",
The new spirit
Nakaya embodies all of this in its purest form.
She collaborates with water, wind, time and people for "sculptures" that are limitless and fleeting like dance figures or musical tones, only that she releases the form of her works entirely from her control into an ephemeral life of her own.
How networked Nakaya works is shown, for example, by her foggy stage for Trisha Brown's dance theater or her collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, famous for his electro-pop band.
When she herself was still working with video – wonderfully like a spider building its web at the original speed of a spider – she co-founded the artist collective Video Hiroba and opened the first gallery for video art in Japan in 1980.
Networking is also at the top of Lissoni's list, so he has announced joint projects with the Lenbachhaus, the Brandhorst Museum and the Munich Art Association for the current year.
And as far as the dialogues are concerned: while the Nakaya show is still running, Haus der Kunst will be coming up with dialogue partners for this almost ninety-year-old grande dame of Japanese contemporary art.
It will feature Japanese group Dumb Type, working at the intersection of art and technology, which Nakaya describes as one of the most exciting "next generation" collectives after many collaborations.
Carsten Nicolai will also show an installation inspired by Japanese Zen gardens; Nakaya was also a lasting inspiration for him.
To date, Fujiko Nakaya has created around ninety fog sculptures around the globe, the two most recent for Munich,
Fujiko Nakaya. fog life.
House of Art Munich;
until July 31st.
A catalog will appear in May.