Fujiko Nakaya

Wolf Prize Laureate in Arts 2023

Fujiko Nakaya

 

Award citation:

“for redefining the possibilities of art-making and transforming the parameters of visual art”.

 

Prize share:

Fujiko Nakaya

Sir Richard Julian Long

 

Fujiko Nakaya was born in Sapporo, Japan. Her early interest in the connections between art and science was inspired by her father’s work and his belief that the realization of scientific truths depended on collaboration between human beings and nature. Like her father, a physicist renowned for his work in glaciology and snow crystal photography, Nakaya’s lifelong artistic investigation engages the element of water and instills a sense of wonder in everyday weather phenomena.

Fujiko Nakaya studied at the High School of Japan Women’s University in Tokyo and at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Tokyo Gallery in 1962. Her work took a significant turn when she joined the Experiments in Art and Technology collective of artists and engineers (E.A.T.).

A bridge between the metaphysical and physical world, the fog has fascinated by its ability to blur the boundaries between reality and imagination. For Nakaya, it “makes visible things become invisible and invisible things—like wind—become visible.”
Working as part of the collective, she enshrouded the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka in vaporous fog, becoming the first artist to create a sculptural fog environment. Nakaya has worked with artificial fog extensively since, creating fog sculptures, and developing immersive and unstable environments, making her a pioneer of the genre. Nakaya is widely known for her early experiments in art and technology, as well as her work in video art. She co-founded the collective Video Hiroba and opened Japan’s first video art gallery. She has collaborated with many international artists and has participated in many international exhibitions.

Fujiko Nakaya, one of Japan’s leading artists, is awarded the Wolf Prize for being a longtime pioneer of work that intermingles the realms of art, nature, science, and technology. Her sculptures, films and videos, installations, and paintings, produced over a seven-decade career, engage fundamental subjects such as the environment, perception, and communication. Nakaya’s early concern with the artistic potential of natural resources, her embrace of nascent technologies, and her exploration of human interaction with our planet, have proven remarkably prescient. Half a century after she first developed the concept of fog sculptures, she continues to astonish audiences with the magic of work made at the junction of art and nature, poetry and science. At heart Nakaya is an experimentalist who disregards predetermined categories and, in so doing, expands the definition and experience of art.

Richard Long

Wolf Prize Laureate in Arts 2023

Sir Richard Julian Long

 

Award citation:

“for redefining the possibilities of art-making and transforming the parameters of visual art”.

 

Prize share:

Sir Richard Julian Long

Fujiko Nakaya

 

Sir Richard Julian Long is an English sculptor and one of the best-known British land artists. He lives and works in Bristol, the city in which he was born. Long studied at the West of England College of Art (1962-1965) and continued his studies at the St. Martin’s School of Art and Design, London (1966-1968). Considered one of the most influential artists, Richard Long’s works have extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond traditional materials and methods. Long’s works engage with the landscape, investigating nature and his experience within nature. His work is typically displayed with materials or through documentary photographs of his performances and experiences.

When Richard Long was 18, he walked on the downs near his native Bristol. He began rolling a snowball through the snow, and when it became too big to push further, he took out his camera – then, instead of snapshotting the giant snowball, he photographed the dark meandering track it had left in the snow. This image, one of his earliest works of land art, was named “Snowball Track”. He was then a student at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, but he was dismissed from the course because his work was considered too provocative and perhaps ahead of its time.

Walking is central to Long’s work as a way of perceiving and recording landscape; early in his career, he established the precedent that art could be a journey and that a sculpture could be deconstructed over the distance of a journey. Walking as a medium has enabled him to articulate ideas about time and space. He seeks freedom of movement and expression and a balance with the natural world through a physical and personal engagement with the land, working with nature to reflect its impermanence and the changing processes of time. His beguilingly simple works commonly take the form of geometric shapes-circles, lines, ellipses, and spirals and use raw materials,
such as stones and driftwood, found along the way. These works are often simple interventions, marks of passage, and leave little or no trace, and are documented through photographs or text works that record his ideas, observations, and experiences.

Richard Long is awarded the Wolf Prize for being a pioneer of conceptual art centered on personal interaction with the natural world. In 1967, his work A Line Made by Walking introduced a contemporary reimagining of human experience in nature as a subject for art. Over the course of nearly six decades, his solitary walks throughout the world have generated a complex body of work comprising sculptures, photographs, drawings, and texts. The materials for these artworks, echoing the walks themselves, are nature-based: rocks and stones, logs and twigs, mud and soil. The tools of time-marking and map-making, place-naming and record-keeping all figure together to create works that commingle factual observation and artistic invention. Long’s deep engagement with the natural environment as process, subject, material, and vocabulary has established him as a key figure of his generation and one whose work resonates powerfully with present-day concerns.