Flying Under Many Flags

Yukinori Yanagi, a 38-year-old Japanese artist who divides his time between Tokyo and New York, once told an interviewer that being Japanese today is like driving 90 miles an hour down a slick highway without being able to see what’s ahead.

Yet far from being fazed by an era when Japan’s traditionally powerful emphasis on national identity has been drastically undercut by incursions of Western culture, Yanagi revels in the serendipity of change and uncertainty.

A selection of some of his recent pieces at the UC Irvine Art Gallery, curated by director Brad Spence and UCI art history professor Bert Winther-Tamaki, reveals a snappy, streamlined visual sense and a probing intellect that looks afresh at relationships between nationalism and globalism, historical events and their impact on contemporary life.

Yanagi’s best-known pieces, three of which are included in this show, involve groupings of two or more national flags made from colored sand and connected to one another with plastic tubing. Colonies of ants (removed before the pieces are displayed) tunnel their way through the flags, undercutting designs sanctified by tradition and depositing random new patterns of colored sand.

The ants’ activities relate to the transnational connections newly established by such global forces as international trade, mass immigration and the Internet. “Pacific,” with its eroded U.S. and Japanese flags linked by red, blue and white layers of sand built up by the industrious ants, holds nationalism and internationalism in a harmonic, even ecological, balance. While the symbolic patterns crumble, a new landscape emerges.

Elsewhere, Yanagi’s view is less benign.

“Hinomaru” refers to the Japanese symbol of a rising red sun with rays on a white field (abbreviated to a red circle on the Japanese flag). It derives from the ancient belief that the sun goddess gave eternal power to the emperor, unquestioned head of a homogeneous “family.”

In the “Hinomaru” drawings, Yanagi telegraphically evokes the struggle between group-think and individuality in populous modern Japan. Individual embossed flower petals suggest a splintered vision of Japan’s imperial blossom, the chrysanthemum. Hundreds of tiny red stamps (personal seals, used on official documents) jockey for position within a symbolic circle like so many sperm or microbes. Although each person’s seal is distinctive, the institution of using them is part of a rigid national practice.

Chrysanthemum imagery continues in “Loves Me / Loves Me Not,” a carpet with an attractive design of scattered flower petals, each accompanied by the distinctive script of a country (Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand . . .) once occupied by Japan.

Yanagi’s reference point in this and other pieces is Japan’s postwar agreement--enshrined in the famous Article Nine of its new constitution--to renounce war forever. (The clause is written on the underside of the rug.)

Pacifism is a huge issue in Japan, where some believe it has become an excuse for protecting the country’s economic interests by remaining aloof even from United Nations peacekeeping missions. Others insist that the victims of Hiroshima can be honored only by the anti-war pledge.

Meanwhile, Japanese youngsters revel in the TV cartoon exploits of naturalized extraterrestrial armies that wipe out aliens threatening Japan’s fabled purity--with unpleasant parallels to the real-life treatment in Japan of Koreans and other minorities.

In Yanagi’s “Banzai Corner,” a couple of mirrors turn a wedge-shaped grouping of red-and-silver Ultraman and Ultraseven toys into a full circle of warriors. The symbolism is rampant: The circle is the image on the Japanese flag, and the dolls’ upraised arms mirror the victorious banzai pose of World War II kamikaze warriors about to step into their suicide planes.

By figuratively mirroring wartime heroics and reinforcing an anti-foreigner theme, even toys created as futuristic images for a new, Westernized generation manage to reinforce Japan’s tightly guarded notions of national identity.

Most subtly universal of Yanagi’s assembled works is “Wandering Position,” a huge red crayon drawing of spidery lines that stagger all over the paper and congeal into dense red patches along its edges.

The wanderer was actually an ant whose path Yanagi tracked through its travels within a restricted circular area (another iteration of the symbolic Japanese circle). Left to its own devices, it chose to spend most of its time on the borders of its artificially created territory--a testament to the natural urge to migrate beyond fixed boundaries.

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* “Yukinori Yanagi: Image, Nation and Transnation,” through April 4, UC Irvine Art Gallery, Fine Arts Village (off Bridge Road on the campus). Noon-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Free. (714) 824-6610.