Yukinori Yanagi was born in Fukuoka in 1959, graduated from Yale University M.F.A in 1990. He was the first Japanese artist to be awarded the prize at Aperto in the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 and immediately rose to prominence. He resided and worked in New York from 1990, showed with Anthony d’Offay (London), Peter Blum (New York) as well as in numerous international exhibitions such as Sao Paulo Biennale (Brazil, 1996), and Biennnale de Lyon (France, 1997). In Whitney Bienniale 2000, Yanagi was one of the first non-American artists selected for the exhibition.
In 1992, his solo exhibition was held at Benesse House Museum (formerly The Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum), captivated by the beauty of the islands in the Seto Inland Sea. In 1995, he encountered the abandoned copper refinery in Inujima, an island close to Okayama, where he proposed an art project to reclaim the refinery, titled “Inujima Project”.
“Inujima Project” finally formed as The Inujima Seirensho Art Museum and opened to the public in 2008. The industrial heritage site representing Japanese modernisation in the Meiji Period and the messages of Mishima Yukio in Showa Period are integrated in this museum with the latest environmentally conscious technology.
Yanagi’s artworks are in a number of museum collections, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and London’s Tate Modern. His humorous and simultaneously provocative works have always been controversial, his activities are beyond the field of “art”. In late 2016 to early 2017, his second large-scale retrospective exhibition “Yukinori Yanagi - Wondering Position” was held at the BankART Studio NYK in Yokohama, voted as the best show in 2016 by Yomiuri Shinbun.
Union Jack Ant Farm is a large installation (H270 x W360cm) comprising twenty plastic boxes connected with resin tubes. Each box depicts a national flag made from synthetic, coloured sand. The artist inserts a large number of ants to move through the boxes that have produced pathways and cracks across the flags. Union Jack Ant Farm is an important historical piece created in 1994 just before the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the United Kingdom.