It begins with a long, slow hiss. The valves open, and a thick fog is released into the air, pouring from the roof of Dogo Onsen Honkan, the famous three-tiered bathhouse built in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, in 1894. It flows down the side of the building, past bathers in bathrobes on the open balcony and begins to settle on the ground.
Soon this "fog sculpture" by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya will have compeletely enveloped the crowd gathered below: bewildered children, TV crews, elderly locals and tourists in yukata (bathrobes) coming from an afternoon hot-spring excursion. For a brief moment, the environment around the old bathhouse disappears into the asynchronous fog and Dogo is lost in time; was this what the area looked like to nomads 3,000 years ago, when they discovered the geothermal springs in this area?
The fog sculpture is one of the centerpiece works at a new art festival on the island of Shikoku called Dogo Onsenart 2014. "The fog is also showing you things in the surrounding environment you can't see; those things are taking form through the fog," says Tsutomu Okada, chief curator of the event. "It's expressing the unseen environment around the onsen."