Artist Fujiko Nakaya has spent more than five decades making sculptures from something that can never hold a permanent shape. Since the world's first fog sculpture at Expo '70 in Osaka, she has used mist as her medium at museums and landmarks around the world. In Paris, the 92-year-old artist filled the circular hall of the Bourse de Commerce with a shifting indoor cloud. The installation, titled Cloud #07156, was on view from June 4 to September 14, 2026.
The work responded to the building itself, including the concrete cylinder designed by Tadao Ando when the museum was renovated. Ando's design emphasizes structure and geometry. Nakaya's fog softened those edges and turned the space into something visible and always changing.
The title comes from the weather station closest to the museum, tying the indoor cloud to the sky over Paris. It also reflects Nakaya's long interest in science. Her father, Ukichiro Nakaya, created the world's first artificial snowflake in 1936 while studying snow crystals.
Nakaya uses only water. High-pressure pumps force it through specially designed nozzles, producing droplets about the same size as those in natural clouds. From a distance the fog looks like a solid mass. Visitors who walked through it were inside the sculpture.
As mist gathered around Ando's cylinder and drifted through the hall, familiar views vanished and returned. People caught brief glimpses of the painted dome above, then lost them again in white haze.
Nakaya does not try to control every outcome. Temperature, humidity, air currents and even visitors moving through the space kept reshaping the fog. The museum's ventilation system joined in too, making airflows visible that usually stay hidden.
The work also reflects the idea of ma, the meaningful space between objects. Nakaya has long used fog to give emptiness a physical form, so viewers notice gaps that architecture usually leaves unseen.
The building's past adds another layer. Before Ando's design and before the art collection arrived, the hall was a trading floor, organized around goods and exchange. Nakaya filled it with something that costs nothing and weighs less than breath: a cloud that forms and fades dozens of times a day, takes no fixed shape and leaves no lasting mark.