In his sculpture and large-scale installations, Yukinori Yanagi casts a crucial gaze on energy constructions from the angle of a nomadic outsider. For the Japanese artist, the expertise of life on the periphery echoes throughout generations, with each his father and grandfather having endured distant army postings in defence of Imperial Japan. Chatting with Japanese artwork historian Reiko Tomii for her 2001 e book Historical past as Reminiscence, Yanagi alluded to the ability of previous over current: ‘I don’t exist with out historical past and I dwell in continuity. If I didn’t assume when it comes to continuity, what that means may an paintings have?’ Fairly how a lot the wartime expertise of Yanagi’s paternal lineage influences his work is unsure, however what stays unequivocal is how its rebellious spirit operates in tandem with a rejection of the centre and its governing programs.
At College in Tokyo, the place he studied portray through the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Yanagi refused to adjust to the college’s calls for for two-dimensional works, as an alternative staging his personal commencement present. In 1988, he moved to the US to review sculpture underneath Frank Gehry and Vito Acconci at Yale College, escaping what he describes in Linda Weintraub’s Within the Making (2003) as ‘being trapped in a large Japanese flag, in a cage, engulfed by nationwide id’. Having established a studio in San Francisco, Yanagi grew to become one of many first overseas artists to take part within the Whitney Biennial in 2000. Regardless of this success, he left America a 12 months later, feeling disillusioned with what he thought of ‘the commercialization of up to date artwork’, and the ‘insidious nature’ of the nation’s widening wealth hole.
Returning to Japan, Yanagi relinquished metropolitan life totally, transferring to the distant islands of Momoshima within the Seto Inland Sea. There, he pursues his iconoclastic apply removed from the general public eye, with massively formidable tasks of immense scale and attain that revitalize communities via the transformation of deserted areas.
The huge, post-industrial halls of Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca present a becoming venue for ‘ICARUS’, Yanagi’s debut European survey and his first exhibiting in Italy because the 1993 Venice Biennale. Yanagi received the coveted Aperto prize that 12 months for World Flag Ant Farm (1990), which epitomizes his technique of undermining immutable symbols of nationalism by presenting them as something however. This legendary set up includes 170 nationwide flags made out of colored sand and housed in particular person, wall-mounted Perspex packing containers. Every field is related by tubes, via which hundreds of ants transport grains of sand, regularly dissolving every flag. An expanded model that includes 30 extra nations is introduced at HangarBicocca, including to current iterations that dissolve boundaries between nations, as in The thirty eighth Parallel (1991), which included solely the flags of North and South Korea.
Animals, particularly bugs, have fascinated Yanagi since childhood. Born in 1959 in a rural area of Fukuoka, southern Japan, Yanagi spent a lot of his youth outdoor, enjoying with frogs and fish in neighbouring rice paddies, whereas holding ants, geckos and bagworms as pets. As an artist, Yanagi makes use of bugs to discover the strain between particular person company and collective programs, reflecting the impermanence of political constructs, decay and, most significantly, migration. For Yanagi, ants are fascinating as a result of they kind good societies, in distinction to human beings. ‘[Due to our intelligence], our society is consistently destined to alter,’ he instructed me by way of e-mail. ‘My artwork is grounded within the message that society can’t be managed, but our massive brains allow us to carry onto the idea of beliefs.’
Inside the context of Japan’s collective atomic trauma – Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima – the precarity of human life and penalties of our over-ambition kind key strands in Yanagi’s work. ‘ICARUS’ opens with a scene of pure carnage: an apocalyptic pile-up of crashed vehicles and stranded boats, twisted metallic and splintered wooden, oil drums spilling from the mangled stays of a transport container, all heaped collectively just like the tragic aftermath of a tsunami. Perched atop is a gigantic, unblinking eye (Mission God-zilla, 2025), in whose iris play spectral visions of nuclear explosions, whereas among the many wreckage neon indicators spell out Japan’s constitutional renouncement of warfare, intermittently illuminating the in any other case darkish house in an ominous purple glow (Article 9, 1994).
Juxtaposed for the primary time, these works replicate Yanagi’s long-standing critique of US affect over Japan’s postwar id, which not solely resulted in Article 9 – an anti-war clause handed throughout allied occupation in 1947 to forestall the nation’s rearmament – however the reawakening of the fictional monster Godzilla, as a consequence of nuclear fallout, within the eponymous 1954 movie. The set up evokes Japan’s constitutional and cultural relationship with warfare whereas highlighting the paradox of its postwar pacifism: renouncing fight however remaining strategically tied to the US military-industrial complicated.
From popular culture to mythology, Icarus Container (2025) fills the exhibition’s essential house – a monumental labyrinth of interlocking transport containers. At one finish, the projected picture of a solar casts an infernal blaze; on the different, a periscopic tower, extending past the confines of the museum, admits daylight. A rumbling soundtrack echoes within the darkness, whereas a sequence of inner mirrors is positioned to replicate both solar or sky anyplace within the labyrinth, relying on the viewer’s orientation.
The set up typifies Yanagi’s multifaceted and trailblazing strategy to the hidden forces that proceed to form Japanese id. Utilizing a discovered object synonymous with each border-crossing and containment, the work highlights Japan’s simultaneous engagement with and restriction on the worldwide stage. Channelling the destiny of Icarus, the work additionally explores the hubris of nuclear power, whereas presenting a option to society between solar and sky, heaven and hell. ‘I consider that humanity has overpassed the beliefs it ought to share,’ Yanagi instructed me. ‘As globalization progresses, there’s a want for beliefs that transcend the boundaries of countries. I work with the assumption that artwork is one such very best.’
Yukinori Yanagi’s ‘ICARUS’ is on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, till 27 July
Major picture: Yukinori Yanagi, The World Flag Ant Farm (element), 1990, ants, coloured sand, plastic packing containers, plastic tubes, plastic pipes, screens, 180 packing containers, 24 × 30 cm. Courtesy: the artist; {photograph}: YANAGI STUDIO
