재고된 국가, 이동하는 경계: 야나기 유키노리(Yanagi Yukinori)의 국기 작업에 나타난 경계 인식

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper examines the work of contemporary Japanese artist Yanagi Yukinori (b. 1959), which utilizes the images of national flags to confront issues related to the concept of national and international borders. Yanagi was born and educated in Japan but moved to the United States in the late 1980s to escape the institutional limitations of the Japanese contemporary art scene and its conservative art education system. While living in the U.S. in the 1990s, he created works that incorporate images of national flags, which serve as significant symbols of the nation-state, in various mediums. Yanagi’s Ant Farm Project and Hinomaru Project both reflect the artist’s interest in the ideas of nation and the border. In Ant Farm Project , of which many iterations were produced, the flags of various countries are created through the placement of colored sands inside transparent plexiglass boxes, and cracks in the surface of each flag are produced over the course of the exhibition by the movement of the ants living inside. Works in the Ant Farm Project signify diverse geographical relationships and territorial disputes between countries, transnational migration across borders, and the the reorganization of the communities and production of hierarchies and conflicts within the international society. By contrast, in his Hinomaru Project , Yanagi focuses exclusively on the Japanese national flag, the Hinomaru. In the work’s various installations, images of the Hinomaru are suggested through the use of a mirror, the form of an Ultraman figure (a popular Japanese sci-fi TV series character), with a neon sign, and by using Haniwa (terracotta clay figures that date from the Kofun period). Some works in the series juxtapose the images of the Hinomaru with symbols of the Japanese imperial family system. These Hinomaru Project works serve to confirm borders that exist within the nation-state; call attention to the discrimination of ethnic minorities in Japan, such as Okinawans and Korean residents in Japan; and expose the contrariety inherent to belief in the universality of the state. Overall, the paper discusses that Yanagi’s works utilizing the images of national flags affirm the multifaceted, ambivalent, and everchanging character of borders in which inclusion and exclusion happen mutually and often simultaneously. The fluid, multilayered, and ambivalent nature of the borders represented in Yanagi’s works enables us to consider the potentiality of expanding national, social, and cultural boundaries in contemporary society.