Fujiko Nakaya (b. Japan, 1933) sculpts a material that is among the most delicate of all: mist. At the Forum, she presents a vibrant homage to her father, physicist Ukichiro Nakaya, creator of the first artificial snowflakes. Reimagining the vast glass walls of the Forum’s building – designed by Renzo Piano – as the Arctic’s glacial expanses, she notably presents archival documents that record her father’s research in Greenland. Within the mist-filled space, a delicate hymn to the fragile beauty of nature resonates.

Paying close attention to the contexts in which he intervenes, Mircea Cantor (b. Romania, 1977) often uses simple materials and gestures. Laureate of the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2011, he has lived in France since he began his studies there. For his first solo exhibition in Japan, he draws inspiration from the play of transparencies created by  Forum’s architecture and offers an original video in which characters walk the streets of Tokyo carrying transparent placards. Created with reference to a previous work produced in Albania in 2003, "Adjective to Your Presence" explores the invisible rules that govern urban space and our presence within it.

Through two successive collective exhibitions, the Forum presents works by artists who have participated in the second cycle of the Foundation’s programme of Artists’ Residencies. Nine artists took up residencies in Hermès workshops between 2014 and 2016, for the most part in France. The works created over this period are presented alongside other pieces by the same artists in order to shed further light on each of their personal universes. Imagined in collaboration with the curator Gaël Charbau, these exhibitions in Japan follow on from "Les Mains sans sommeil" (‘The Sleepless Hands’) held at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.