Yukinori Yanagi. Wandering Position

At Chisenhale Gallery Yukinori Yanagi creates an installation entitled Wandering Position. For this work, over the course of ten days, the artist traced the movements of a red ant within a defined area of floor space with red chalk. The work evokes metaphors of urban life and social organisation as well as the more troubling realities of entrapment, forced accommodation and restraint.

In Wandering Position, there is a startling unequal relationship of power between the Yanagi and the ant. The artist was in effect totally subjected to laboriously following the decisions of the tiny creature and yet, ultimately, dominated the bounds of their situation. Through this process the audience was motivated to look at their own position, and to consider the strategies of social control that exist within our own society.

Born in Fukuoka, Yukinori Yanagi graduated from Musashino Art University, Tokyo, with a B.F.A in 1983 and later a M.F.A. in painting in 1985. In 1990, Yanagi completed research in sculpture under a scholarship at Yale University. His work has been shown internationally including: the Lyon Biennale in 1997, Taipei Biennale (1998); Landscape Encoded at the Tate Modern, London (2000); a solo exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2002); and the Fukuoka Triennial.

Yukinori Yanagi
Wandering Position