[1] She was a co-founder and the longest-standing female member of the Gutai Art Association, an avant-garde artists' collective established by Jirō Yoshihara.
[4] Impressed by Yoshihara's radically novel approach to art, Yamazaki began studying with him and eventually became a member of Gutai upon its establishment under his leadership.
[5][6] As Gutai gradually garnered interest in the international art world, Yamazaki showed her works at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1958) and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1965).
[5][7] She later received solo exhibitions at Ashiya City Museum of Art and History (2004), Galerie Almine Rech in Paris (2010), and Take Ninagawa in Tokyo (2013 and 2015).
[4] Reflecting, tinting, and distorting the surroundings, the pile of pink tin cans captured the mesmerizing visual shock brought by Western consumer goods, urbanization, and technological development in post-war Japan.
At the four edges of the panel, Yamazaki mounted small rectangular mirrors, which reflected viewers’ bodies and the exhibition space in fragments.
[4] Yamazaki's installation created for 'Gutai Group Room' at the Shinko Independent Exhibition in 1956 similarly aimed at redefining how viewers see the world.
It called for a departure from conventional and accepted vantage points of viewing the world, prompting viewers to look and experience differently.
[4] Meanwhile, viewers outside the tent observed flimsy shadows of deformed human shapes that floated on the red vinyl sheets.
At the same time, the dazzlingly colorful gleams again evoked the visual experience of the luminosity of movie screens, televisions, pachinko machines, and neon lights – increasingly prevalent objects in the prospering urban space of 1950s Japan.
[4] For 'The 4th Gutai Art Exhibition', held in the same year in Tokyo, Yamazaki created a group of tin works by pouring and dripping aniline dye and varnish onto tinplate panels.
Since the late 1990s, Yamazaki had returned to her earlier exploration of tinplate, creating abstract paintings with liquid dye on tin panels.