Transforming Public Spaces: Fujiko Nakaya's 'Living Fog' at the Bourse de Commerce

On a damp October morning in Paris, the Bourse de Commerce—a transformed 18th-century grain exchange—disappeared under swaths of fog. This was Fog x Floats (2023), an installation by Fujiko Nakaya, whose medium is the air itself.

Nakaya, now 90, has spent decades perfecting her fog sculptures. Developed using high-pressure nozzles that atomize water into fine particles, her installations respond to humidity, temperature, and wind. "Fog doesn’t obey," Nakaya has said, "it negotiates." At the Bourse de Commerce, her work highlights the permeability of Tadao Ando's cylindrical concrete insertion within the historic domed structure.

The institution, reopened in 2021 as home to François Pinault’s contemporary art collection, symbolizes a meeting point of past and present. Ando's intervention—a 9-meter-high concrete cylinder—juxtaposes minimalist modernism against the ornate neoclassical original. Nakaya’s fog dissolves boundaries between architecture, art, and audience. Visitors enter a space where outlines blur and perception flickers.

This is not Nakaya's first collaboration with Ando. Their partnership began in 1998, when she created a fog work for his Water Temple in Japan. At the Bourse de Commerce, the dialogue between their practices feels particularly pointed. Ando’s concrete is immovable and geometric. Nakaya’s fog is transient and organic. Together, they reimagine public engagement with monumental architecture. "This is a reminder," said Philippe Régnier, editor-in-chief of Le Quotidien de l’Art, "that art can destabilize even the most domineering of spaces."

The installation counters traditional expectations of public art. Where permanent sculptures seek immortality, Nakaya's work emphasizes impermanence. In a city filled with grand statues, her fog asks: What if public art vanishes as quickly as it appears? How does this fleeting nature reshape our relationship with the spaces they inhabit?

Visitors engaged with the fog beyond passive observation. Children ran through the mist, arms outstretched like amateur meteorologists. Couples posed for photographs, their outlines blurred into abstraction. Architecture students from the École des Ponts et Chaussées sketched rapidly, trying to capture forms that dissolved before their eyes. The fog turned the rotunda into a participatory field.

This shift aligns with a broader trend in contemporary art installations, emphasizing interaction and experience over objecthood. Critics argue that spectacle overtakes substance, but Nakaya’s practice resists such reduction. Her fog sculptures elude commodification. To photograph Fog x Floats is to capture absence as much as presence. The work exists in motion, altering with the weather and each visitor’s movement.

The Bourse de Commerce’s programming under Pinault has leaned heavily on site-specific commissions designed to challenge its unique architecture. Earlier this year, the museum hosted Urs Fischer’s wax sculpture Rape of the Sabine Women (2022), which melted during the exhibition. However, Nakaya’s fog brings a different sensibility—the fragility of the natural world encroaching on the rigidity of the built environment. It resonates in an era of climate precarity.

The installation coincides with a surge of interest in how public art can redefine civic spaces. In October, the Tate Modern unveiled El Anatsui’s Tsiatsia - Searching for Connection, while Olafur Eliasson’s light installation Your Only Real Thing is Time premiered at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Both works, like Nakaya’s, emphasize temporality and audience interaction. But where Eliasson and Anatsui rely on material complexity, Nakaya works with nature’s most elemental force—water.

Nakaya’s fog installations have traversed the globe, from the Guggenheim Museum in New York to Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut. Yet each iteration is tied to its local environment. At the Bourse de Commerce, the interplay between fog and Parisian light creates effects Nakaya herself could not entirely predict. "This work," wrote architecture critic Frédéric Edelmann in Le Monde, "is as Parisian as the Seine’s morning mist, but it belongs to no one."

The ephemerality of Fog x Floats critiques the permanence sought by traditional public art. The work will dissipate at the exhibition’s close on November 30, leaving no trace. Yet, the impact on visitors—those who momentarily lost their bearings—may linger longer than marble monuments.

Nakaya and Ando remind us that public spaces are not static. They are shaped by people and weather as much as by design. The Bourse de Commerce may return to clarity come December, but for now, it exists as a fog-bound threshold where art, architecture, and the public meet.