[9][10] He has spoken of his childhood experiences of picking up ‘everyday objects’ marked with Korean hangul that had washed up on the shore from the Sea of Japan as the beginning of his long-term interest in transpacific and transnational boundaries and movement.

[12] Growing up in the 1960s before the development of widespread video games, Yanagi's childhood activities involved playing with insects in the countryside, especially ants and bagworm moths, and creating things out of various materials such as concrete and wax from a hardware store owned by one of his relatives.

[13] He was interested in the work of artists from the Mono-ha generation, especially of Noriyuki Haraguchi’s industrial sculptures,[13] and became increasingly restless within the conventions of the University’s painting department.

[12][11] These studies allowed the young artist to gain a fuller picture of World War II, and question the omissions and identitarian narratives of both the Japanese and American perspectives of their national wartime history.

[15] He began to engage seriously with the idea of "wandering as a permanent position," creating artworks to dissolve the fixity of symbols associated with nations and regions, attempting to account for the changes that occur through time and circumstance.

[16] In the first year of his MFA at Yale University, Yanagi began thinking about the figure of the wandering ant as a multifaceted allegory for transnational movement.

He thought of the ant colony as a perfectly organized communal society—exemplary on the one hand of a blind obedience, but also reflective of an unstoppable ecosystem of working parts that could surpass and dismantle any concept of national boundaries or borders.

[1][12][18] The constant ‘wandering’ of the ants through each national symbol was exemplary of Yanagi’s ongoing engagement with the often muddled processes of globalization, the crossing of transnational borders, the diasporic movement of peoples, and the ultimate precarity of nationhood, race, and identity.

Euro Circuit consisted of 12 ant colony units, one to represent the highest value of cash currency for each country that originally joined the European Union.

[25] As the ants tunnel through the installation, the distinctive currencies gradually dissolve into a ‘universal’ banknote, demonstrating Yanagi’s reflections on the possibilities of a world becoming more and more transnational.

[25] From the early 1990s, Yanagi also produced a series of sculptures and site-specific installations that aimed to deconstruct the nationalist ideology of modern Japan through the motif of the Hinomaru, or the Japanese flag.

[12][16] This work was exhibited alongside American Flag Ant Farm (1989), becoming a New York debut that demonstrated Yanagi’s ongoing engagement with the instability of national borders and his own ‘entrapment within mobility.’[16] One particularly acclaimed piece from this series is Banzai Corner (1991).

[26] Each character has been carefully arranged so that its right arm is raised in the air to imply a victorious ‘Banzai’ in praise of the hinomaru, but viewers can see that in reality the figurines only celebrate their own reflection.

[26] Yanagi’s use of Ultraman and Ultra Seven figurines for this artwork has been attributed to the Okinawan identity of the character’s creator, Tetsuo Kinjō, who grew up during the American occupation of Okinawa.

[31][30] It included an outline of the trademark chrysanthemum flower that is the Imperial Seal of Japan, but with only one of its golden petals attached and the remaining 15 scattered around the expanse of the carpet.

[30] Besides directly confronting the debate about national memory loss and historical revisionism regarding the war period, by juxtaposing the visible imperial symbol with the obstructed democratic constitutional guarantees hidden below, Yanagi's installation pointed to the structural contradictions of Japan's modernization.

The artist's choice to obstruct the democratic principles from view on the underside of the carpet alludes to the subtle continuity of the survival of the Japanese emperor system, even in the postwar.

[30] In the exhibition space, Yanagi's red carpet led to an Occupation-era photograph of SCAP General Douglas MacArthur standing with Emperor Hirohito, captioned as Chrysanthemum and Sword[32] with a quote by poet and novelist Mishima Yukio superimposed in red, reading “Why should his Imperial Majesty become human?”[30] This inclusion evokes criticisms of the continuities and discontinuities of Japanese sovereignty ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the Pacific War, implicating the resilience of Japanese nationalism as well as the American occupation of Japan decades later.

In 1997, Yanagi created a smaller version of the Chrysanthemum Carpet as limited edition multiple entitled Loves Me/Loves Me Not (1997) during his residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

[9] The installation was made from two large-scale sheets of sheer nylon voile fabric, with screenprints of the giant mushroom cloud that occurred when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in 1945.

[9][26] On this, Yanagi stated, “universality of children’s tales enables us to know that we, as a species, share common core values and hopes all around the globe.”[26] The mythologies of the box parallel Yanagi’s allegory for Japan that at once acknowledges Japan’s victimization in the aftermath of the atomic bombs but also the nation’s own role as a colonial aggressor in the Asia Pacific — the Pandora’s box revealed a hope for a future world with no more victims of nuclear warfare.

[7] In 1995, Yanagi came up with his vision for the revitalization of the entire island of Inujima; he aimed to revamp the long-defunct copper '"seirensho" (refinery) as a permanent, site-specific artwork using renewable energy, a project that was realized with the support from Benesse Corporation’s CEO at the time, Soichiro Fukutake.

[2][30] Using dismantled and reconstructed parts of Mishima's residence, Yanagi spent years building a series of installations entitled Hero Dry Cell (2008) within the copper refinery, creating a permanent artwork that was also fused with the architectural heritage of the industrial site.

[36] In 2010, the inaugural Setouchi International Art Triennale featured three installations created by Yanagi in collaboration with architect Kazuyo Sejima, in addition to the Injuma Seirensho Art Museum[7] Due to his long term project in Japan, Yanagi began traveling often between his studios in New York and Inujima, and eventually the artist closed his studios in the United States to move back to Japan full time.

[37] Inside the defunct copper refinery that makes up the Inujima Seirensho Art Museum, Yanagi spent more than a decade constructing a six-part permanent art installation entitled Hero Dry Cell (2008) that utilized mirrors, natural light, local stones, water elements, and architectural collage to create an interconnected, multi-layered installation about the modernization of Japan and legacy of the postwar.