Detail View: Visual Resources Teaching Collection: America

aahi0002356

America

full view

Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi replicated the thirty-six flags of the nations of North and South America in a grid of Plexiglass boxes, each filled with pigmented sand forming the image of a particular flag. The boxes were connected by a system of clear tubing through whch live ants slowly traveled from flag to flag in the grid, evenually disrupting the sand patterns -- disassembling the flags and dissolving national identities. (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996. Anne Farrell, ed. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1997.)

1994

creation

2008-10-24

Yukinori Yanagi (Japanese, born 1959)

male

Japanese sculptor. He studied at Musashino Art University, Tokyo, and completed a fellowship in sculpture at Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 1990. Initially Yanagi was influenced by the Minimalist and Conceptualist orientation of the Japanese Monoha movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s; soon after he became known for a series of performances using coloured gas. He rose to international prominence in the 1990s following the success of a number of seminal installations that employed ants as metaphors for global migration. In the Wandering Position series (begun in 1989) Yanagi used chalk to trace out the path of an ant as it moved about a circumscribed area. The World Flag Ant Farm (1990; first exh. Venice Biennale, 1993; see 1996 exh. cat., p. 37) elaborated on his ideas through an installation that comprised a complex of wall-mounted plexiglass boxes filled with coloured sand depicting a number of national flags. He added ants to the boxes, allowing them to crawl around and move the sand from one box to another via transparent tubes, thus progressively destroying the integrity of the flags. Yanagi's interest in the nation state developed throughout the 1990s to encompass other themes, including ideology, nationalism and the construction of cultural difference. In Pacific (1997; see 1997 exh. cat.) he addressed the subject of Japanese imperialism by means of an installation in several sections: an enlarged, cast sheet of model parts for a children's toy battle ship; a large cast of the constructed ship itself; and a map of the Pacific Ocean covered in fragments of broken glass bearing silkcreeened images of sunken ships. (Morgan Falconer. "Yanagi, Yukinori." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. 18 Mar. 2009 .)

20th century

Contemporary

ants

flags

America

insects

animals

sculpture (visual works)

installations (visual works)

sculptures and installations

plexiglass boxes, pigmented sand, tubing, ants

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

exhibition

San Diego, California

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996. Anne Farrell, ed. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1997.

0-934418-44-6

161

bottom

ISBN

© Philipp Scholz Rittermann

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© Yukinori Yanagi

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