Advanced Photo Artist Share: Yukinori Yanagi

Yukinori Yanagi

Yukinori Yanagi was born in Fukuoka, Japan in 1959.  He received his BFA in painting from the Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 1983 as well as his MFA in painting in 1985 from the same school.  In 1990 he went on to receive a second MFA in sculpture from Yale and currently teaches at the Hiroshima City University in Japan. 

Yanagi’s work conceptually discusses national and international identity as it relates to living and making art in Japan as well as borders and assigned roles or duties.  My main interest in him stems from his use of insects (primarily ants) to convey the notion of mindless work or a specific place or set standard for different groups of people which can have negative or positive effects on society as a whole.  This insect artist relationship is something I would like to incorporate into my own work in one way or another, mainly because I believe it can be construed to symbolize not only human population on a large scale, but a natural and un planned deterioration of a given concept depicted visually through a photograph. I also want to use the idea of consumption or eating as it relates to insect involvement in my own work. 

Union Jack Ant Farm

This piece depicts an art farm using sand colored in a way that creates the British flag.  Ants slowly move about the piece, deteriorating the overall image and create a tarnished and tunnel riddled flag. 

            “It simultaneously depicts thee spread of a tribe and the decline of an empire.”- Yanagi

Wandering Position

Yanagi placed himself in a 15-foot square frame where for hours on end for several days he would follow one ant around slowly, tracing its path with a crayon.  Yanagi states that this piece is primarily about animal artist relationship as well as confinement of a worker and actions taken based on enclosure.  Yanagi installed this piece at several different locations primarily Alcatraz and his studio in North America.  The locations of these installations were a key component in each of their meanings and posed different conceptual statements and questions.

World Flag Ant Farm

This piece at a glance seems to be a wall of encased flags from all over the world, but at a closer look Yanagi has made ant farms of each major country in the world and interconnected all of them.  This creates a slow but steady mixture of sand from one ant farm to another, showing a fantastic relation between the intermingling of culture throughout the world.  The longer the piece is up, the more deconstructed each country’s flag gets individually, and the more connected the overall piece becomes visually.