In an interview for her alma mater, Matsui notes that she had a weak constitution when she was in elementary school and spent a lot of time at home reading and drawing images inspired from manga that she enjoyed while listening to the sounds of the lumbermill that was in her neighborhood.
These formative experiences in traditional calligraphic art and her subsequent shift to textile design, which emphasizes structure over content, ultimately inform and influence Matsui's later works in significant ways.
These installations included various elements such as sculptures, objects, drawings, paintings, and photos are composed together without restriction with special attention to the unique qualities of each medium and material.
at the Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, curator Mizuo Kato notes that, “in Matsui’s pre-2000 installations, objects with a variety of textures were distributed around a space, and in order to suggest subtle connections between them, it was necessary for the viewer to walk around, attempt to link fragments of meaning and feel their way around to grasp the overall image.
In her installation piece for the Aperto Section of the 44th Venice Biennale, Channel - With the Speed of Her Mind, Matsui covered the floors and walls of the exhibition space with lead tiles.
In front of the white cube was a column of stacked hexagonal glass glued together and the floor was littered with fallen blue strings that she had tied to the steel equipment on the ceiling.
Barbara London, associate curator of the museum's Department of Film and Video at the time of their exhibition, notes that installation art “recently emerged as a major avant-garde movement in Korea and Japan.
Artists are free to use whatever materials they wish… In Japan and Korea, where social norms are narrowly defined, this freedom is liberating.” Matsui points a spotlight to the struggles that face women in Japanese society by including a sanmenkyo, a Japanese three-part folding vanity mirror, in her installation Labor, exhibited at MoMA, “an interface between a woman’s private persona and the restrained face she carefully arranges for public appearance.” [3] From the 2000s, her primary medium shifted to video works, notably her Heidi series.
In her reportage of the Triennale Janet Polos wrote in Art in America that “the scenes are sexual yet often emotionally vacant.” Her participation in the 2005 Yokohama Trienniale exemplifies her continued commitment to site-specific installations and her growing interest in video works.