is a contemporary Japanese artist.
Yukinori Yanagi is a contemporary Japanese artist who has addressed themes of national and transnational sovereignty, globalization and borders, as well as Japan’s imperial history and nationalism. He is considered one of the first postwar Japanese artists that is openly critical of Japanese society and governmental policy. Many of Yanagi’s artworks consists of large-scale, site-specific installations that engage with movement and symbols of nationalism.
Yukinori Yanagi achieved a major international breakthrough in 1993 when he was awarded the Aperto Award at the 45th Venice Biennale.Following this recognition, his work entered major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Tate Modern (London). In 2000, he was among the first foreign artists invited to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial, alongside Cai Guo-Qiang. He is widely recognized for his role in regional revitalization, most notably for the Inujima Seirensho Art Museum. This long-term project began in 1995and culminated in the 2008 opening of a permanent art complex created by revamping a long-defunct copper refinery on the island of Inujima, which has become an integral location of the Setouchi International Art Triennale.
His global profile remains prominent through recent contributions to major biennials including the Busan Biennale 2016 in Busan, South Korea, the 21st Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2018), and the Ad-Diriyah Biennale in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia (2021), as well as significant solo exhibitions including ICARUS at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, Italy (2025) and El Mare Pacificum at Estación MAZ in Guadalajara, Mexico (2026).
Following the completion of the Inujima Seirensho Art Museum, Yanagi established the collaborative team YANAGI + ART BASE. Working alongside architects and designers, he has focused on revitalizing industrial ruins and abandoned structures. His primary ongoing initiative is ART BASE MOMOSHIMA, a non-profit art project established in 2012. His current work continues to expand into the study of international history and territories from a sea perspective, including the Anjwa Island Project / Floating Museum in South Korea, where he continues to explore the reclamation of neglected landscapes through site-specific art. Early life and education in Japan
Early life Yanagi was born and raised in a rural region of Fukuoka, Japan. Growing up in the prefecture closest to the Korean Peninsula allowed Yanagi to grow up with a distinct awareness of the existence of other nations and cultures. He has spoken of his childhood experiences of picking up ‘everyday objects’ marked with Korean hangul that had washed up on the shore from the Sea of Japan as the beginning of his long-term interest in transpacific and transnational boundaries and movement.
Like many Japanese people of his generation, Yanagi's family was part of the Empire of Japan's Pacific War war effort. An awareness of this familial history has informed the artist's body of work: his father was a fighter pilot, and his paternal grandfather worked in border control in Japan’s former colony Manchukuo and was detained for more than a decade in Siberia and China following Japan’s surrender. In his artwork, Yanagi considers continuity and diversity with regards to his own position and the place of the Japanese nation within this tumultuous history.
Growing up in the 1960s before the development of widespread video games, Yanagi's childhood activities involved playing with insects in the countryside, especially ants and bagworm moths, and creating things out of various materials such as concrete and wax from a hardware store owned by one of his relatives. Furthermore, Yanagi’s uncle was avant-garde artist Miyazaki Junnosuke, a member of Kyushu-ha, which meant Yanagi was accustomed to seeing artistic objects and sculptures from an early age.
Education and early career in Tokyo Yanagi earned both a BA and MFA in painting from Musashino Art University in Western Tokyo (1985).
He was interested in the work of artists from the Mono-ha generation, especially of Noriyuki Haraguchi's industrial sculptures, and became increasingly restless within the conventions of the University’s painting department. Despite being told that graduation work must be limited to flat works and oil paint only, Yanagi created a sculpture out of wooden supports and was subsequently excluded from the graduate thesis exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Tokyo. For his first solo exhibition the following year he burned all the artworks he made in art school and exhibited the ashes in large wooden boxes as the installation Ground Transport Project (1985). It was in this installation that Yanagi first included the element of live ants, a characteristic that he became known for throughout the 1990s.
From 1986, Yanagi began to exhibit artwork that addressed issues of “movement” from the perspective of an outsider of the art world’s system. This included his installation Ground Transposition (1987) that included large, spherical sculptures that were scaled to the human form in relation to the proportions to the size of dung beetles and the ball of dung that they roll as part of their ecology. The proportional scaling was a reference to the ancient Egyptian symbolism of the dung beetle as a ‘steward of the sun’ tasked with physically pushing the weight of the sun across the sky each day, which for Yanagi was a direct reference to the rising sun of the Japanese flag and the weight of Japanese nationalism that the artist felt. In the late 1980s Yanagi exhibited his work at various galleries in Tokyo, Kanagawa, and Fukuoka, including a prominent solo exhibition held at the Hillside Gallery in Daikanyama, in which he executed a smoky performance piece entitled I Feel Yellow (1987). He was awarded the Excellence Award in Art Document from the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts in 1987.
Move to the United States Despite the promising trajectory of his art career in Tokyo following his graduation, Yanagi was increasingly disillusioned with the Japanese art world, describing his feeling of “being trapped in a giant Japanese flag, in a cage, engulfed by national identity.” The artist moved to United States in 1988 to earn an MFA from the Sculpture Department of the Graduate School of Yale School of Art (1990), where he studied under Vito Acconci and Frank Gehry, among others.
At Yale, Yanagi started to expand on his engagement with Japanese nationalism and history after having the opportunity to read the works of prominent prewar Japanese intellectuals such as Nishida Kitarō and Kuki Shūzō, as well as texts and documents from or about the Pacific War that were difficult to access in Japan but available in the US. These studies allowed the young artist to gain a fuller picture of World War II, and question the omissions and identitarian narratives of both the Japanese and American perspectives of their national wartime history. He began to engage seriously with the idea of "wandering as a permanent position," creating artworks to dissolve the fixity of symbols associated with nations and regions, attempting to account for the changes that occur through time and circumstance. Ants and national boundaries – late 1980s–1990s
Artworks from Yale University, 1988–1989 In the first year of his MFA at Yale University, Yanagi began thinking about the figure of the wandering ant as a multifaceted allegory for transnational movement. He began to regularly incorporate the insects into his artworks, a live element that became emblematic of Yanagi’s body of work from the 1990s. He thought of the ant colony as a perfectly organized communal society—exemplary on the one hand of a blind obedience, but also reflective of an unstoppable ecosystem of working parts that could surpass and dismantle any concept of national boundaries or borders.
Yanagi came up with the Ant Following Plan (1988) at the end of his first semester, in which he tracked the wandering movements of a single ant on the dark floor of his mostly empty 5-by-9-meter studio space using thick red chalk. Shortly after, he debuted American Flag Ant Farm (1989), which he crafted from an Uncle Milton toy ant farm by adding an extra panel with sand colored to appear as the American flag. The ‘wandering’ ants created tunnels that disintegrated the stars and stripes of the flag, overlaying macro and micro elements (nation vs ant) to dismantle and critique the permanence of the symbol of American national unity.
These earlier works would prove to be very impactful, informing much Yanagi’s works for the next ten years. He continued working on and expanding his ‘Ant Farm Series’ from 1990-2002. He also resurfaced the ‘ant following’ technique in 1994 for his ongoing series ‘Wandering Position’ (1994–Present)’ in which he performs site-specific live tracings of a wandering ant (San Diego, California in 1994; Alcatraz, California, 1996; Anomaly Gallery, Tokyo, 2021). He also uses this technique to create more conventional works for traditional gallery spaces on large format papers and copper plates.
Following his graduation from Yale, Yanagi moved to New York where he started to work internationally.
World Flag Ant Farm (1990) In 1991, Yanagi exhibited World Flag Ant Farm (1990) at Los Angeles’s LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in one of the prominent solo exhibitions that launched his international career. World Flag Ant Farm was a large-scale installation consisting of 180 national ‘flags’ representing the members of the United Nations at the time. Each ‘flag’ was made out of a plastic box filled with colored sand in the pattern of the flag. They are interconnected by plastic tubes as they hung on the wall. As the title suggests, the entire artwork functioned as a multitude of interconnected ant colonies which could be viewed through the plastic by audiences. As the tiny insects tunneled through each flag and carried colored grains of sand to other areas, the colors and signs of national unity intermixed and began to dissolve the individual flags, creating a blurred image of a single, more ambiguous flag.
World Flag Ant Farm was well received and Yanagi's approach was considered ‘iconic’ especially in the context of the end of the Cold War and rising globalization and postcolonial studies, even being featured on the cover of the international art magazine Art in America, despite also facing harsh criticism from animal rights activists. The constant ‘wandering’ of the ants through each national symbol was exemplary of Yanagi’s ongoing engagement with the often muddled processes of globalization, the crossing of transnational borders, the diasporic movement of peoples, and the ultimate precarity of nationhood, race, and identity. Yanagi has said that he personally identifies with the piece, that it is related to the “borders I have had to cross or barriers I have confronted in trying to define myself as a Japanese.” The World Flag Ant Farm was exhibited at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, where Yanagi became the first Japanese artist to be awarded the Aperto Award as an emerging artist. In 1992, with the aid of the Asian Cultural Council, Yanagi was invited to the International Studio Program at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.
This artwork marked the maturation of Yanagi’s ant farm idea and the beginning of a long series of Ant Farm Projects in which colonies of ants would slowly dissolve symbols of nationalism, including flags, currency, and American art. World Flag Ant Farm (1990) is in the collection of the Benesse House, Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Naoshima.
Ant Farm Project series (1990–2002)