Yukinori Yanagi Waves the Flag for Freedom

In his sculpture and large-scale installations, Yukinori Yanagi casts a critical gaze on power structures from the perspective of a nomadic outsider. For the Japanese artist, the experience of life on the periphery echoes across generations, with both his father and grandfather having endured remote military postings in defence of Imperial Japan. Speaking to Japanese art historian Reiko Tomii for her 2001 book History as Memory, Yanagi alluded to the power of past over present: ‘I do not exist without history and I live in continuity. If I did not think in terms of continuity, what meaning could an artwork have?’ Quite how much the wartime experience of Yanagi’s paternal lineage influences his work is uncertain, but what remains unequivocal is how its rebellious spirit operates in tandem with a rejection of the centre and its governing systems.

At University in Tokyo, where he studied painting during the mid-1980s, Yanagi refused to comply with the school’s demands for two-dimensional works, instead staging his own graduation show. In 1988, he moved to the US to study sculpture under Frank Gehry and Vito Acconci at Yale University, escaping what he describes in Linda Weintraub’s In the Making (2003) as ‘being trapped in a giant Japanese flag, in a cage, engulfed by national identity’. Having established a studio in San Francisco, Yanagi became one of the first foreign artists to participate in the Whitney Biennial in 2000. Despite this success, he left America a year later, feeling disillusioned with what he considered ‘the commercialization of contemporary art’, and the ‘insidious nature’ of the country’s widening wealth gap.

Returning to Japan, Yanagi relinquished metropolitan life entirely, moving to the remote islands of Momoshima in the Seto Inland Sea. There, he pursues his iconoclastic practice far from the public eye, with hugely ambitious projects of immense scale and reach that revitalize communities through the transformation of abandoned spaces.

The vast, post-industrial halls of Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca provide a fitting venue for ‘ICARUS’, Yanagi’s debut European survey and his first showing in Italy since the 1993 Venice Biennale. Yanagi won the coveted Aperto prize that year for World Flag Ant Farm (1990), which epitomizes his strategy of undermining immutable symbols of nationalism by presenting them as anything but. This legendary installation comprises 170 national flags made from coloured sand and housed in individual, wall-mounted Perspex boxes. Each box is connected by tubes, through which thousands of ants transport grains of sand, gradually dissolving each flag. An expanded version featuring 30 additional countries is presented at HangarBicocca, adding to existing iterations that dissolve boundaries between nations, as in The 38th Parallel (1991), which included only the flags of North and South Korea.

Animals, especially insects, have fascinated Yanagi since childhood. Born in 1959 in a rural region of Fukuoka, southern Japan, Yanagi spent much of his formative years outdoors, playing with frogs and fish in neighbouring rice paddies, while keeping ants, geckos and bagworms as pets. As an artist, Yanagi uses insects to explore the tension between individual agency and collective systems, reflecting the impermanence of political constructs, decay and, most importantly, migration. For Yanagi, ants are fascinating because they form perfect societies, in contrast to human beings. ‘[Due to our intelligence], our society is constantly destined to change,’ he told me via email. ‘My art is grounded in the message that society cannot be controlled, yet our large brains enable us to hold onto the concept of ideals.’

Within the context of Japan’s collective atomic trauma – Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima – the precarity of human life and consequences of our over-ambition form key strands in Yanagi’s work. ‘ICARUS’ opens with a scene of pure carnage: an apocalyptic pile-up of crashed cars and stranded boats, twisted metal and splintered wood, oil drums spilling from the mangled remains of a shipping container, all heaped together like the tragic aftermath of a tsunami. Perched atop is an enormous, unblinking eye (Project God-zilla, 2025), in whose iris play spectral visions of nuclear explosions, while among the wreckage neon signs spell out Japan’s constitutional renouncement of war, intermittently illuminating the otherwise dark space in an ominous red glow (Article 9, 1994).

Juxtaposed for the first time, these works reflect Yanagi’s long-standing critique of US influence over Japan’s postwar identity, which not only resulted in Article 9 – an anti-war clause passed during allied occupation in 1947 to prevent the country’s rearmament – but the reawakening of the fictional monster Godzilla, as a consequence of nuclear fallout, in the eponymous 1954 film. The installation evokes Japan’s constitutional and cultural relationship with war while highlighting the paradox of its postwar pacifism: renouncing combat but remaining strategically tied to the US military-industrial complex.

From pop culture to mythology, Icarus Container (2025) fills the exhibition’s main space – a monumental labyrinth of interlocking shipping containers. At one end, the projected image of a sun casts an infernal blaze; at the other, a periscopic tower, extending beyond the confines of the museum, admits daylight. A rumbling soundtrack echoes in the darkness, while a series of internal mirrors is positioned to reflect either sun or sky anywhere in the labyrinth, depending on the viewer’s orientation.

The installation typifies Yanagi’s multifaceted and trailblazing approach to the hidden forces that continue to shape Japanese identity. Using a found object synonymous with both border-crossing and containment, the work highlights Japan’s simultaneous engagement with and restriction on the global stage. Channelling the fate of Icarus, the work also explores the hubris of nuclear energy, while presenting a choice to society between sun and sky, heaven and hell. ‘I believe that humanity has lost sight of the ideals it should share,’ Yanagi told me. ‘As globalization progresses, there is a need for ideals that transcend the boundaries of nations. I work with the belief that art is one such ideal.’

Yukinori Yanagi’s ‘ICARUS’ is on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, until 27 July

_{Main image: Yukinori Yanagi, The World Flag Ant Farm (detail), 1990, ants, colored sand, plastic boxes, plastic tubes, plastic pipes, monitors, 180 boxes, 24 × 30 cm. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: YANAGI STUDIO}