Yanagi was discovered by conceptual photographer Yasumasa Morimura, who noticed some of her work while borrowing her house as a set for a separate project.
It was only when she needed to photograph these works for documentation that she realized her skill at photography and decided to pursue this new line of art.
She creates an elaborate, and often costly, staged event using female models ranging in different ages.
The international exposure to a commercial art market gave her major advantage over other Japanese artists.
Because of the lack of a contemporary art market in Japan and her success in Germany in 1996 she decided to display her work overseas.
With it, she focuses on themes of everyday life, self-identity, architecture, and employment in the world of girls who operate the elevators of Japanese department stores.
[6][n 1] During the interview process she asks her interviewees questions such as 'What kind of world do you want to see in 50 years?
A girl named Mie imagines that in 50 years she will be lonely, looking around a field of empty landscapes during a time of a cataclysm.
In Yanagi's third popular series, Fairy Tales, she focuses on stories in which the main characters are usually simultaneously both old and young and deals with the relationships between the two ages.
What is left is a strange unresolved combination of an old woman with youthful limbs and appendages, confusing the distinction between old and young.
In the video Suna Onna (i.e. "sand woman", 2005) Yanagi shows the relationship between a child and her grandmother.
Instead they hear preschooler children's voices dubbed over the interview as they read aloud the grandmothers' responses.
[2] In a new show in 2010, Yanagi paired four older photographs from Fairy Tales alongside the unveiling of her newest 2010 video, Lullaby.
This piece looks at the relationships between the young and old, using jumps, cuts, and slow motion edits in the video to stress the importance of time.
The piece also juxtaposes enclosed vs open spaces, relating to the bigger picture of dream states and reality.
The video ends with a fight on a rooftop in which the two women join hands, and come together as they fall back into the fireplace room.
Yanagi also did another performance piece in which she hired someone who was to show contemporary art in a museum to visitors as a real guide would.
Zero Hour deals with the story of Iva Toguri D'Aquino, a Japanese-American DJ for a propagandist radio program who was arrested upon return to the US in 1950 and wrongly found guilty of treason.
Employing interpretive dance, projected images and traditional dialogue, Yanagi says Zero Hour "explores the role of media in the context of theatre".