Miwa Yanagi earned a Master of Fine Arts in Crafts from the Graduate School of Kyoto City University of Arts in 1991. She was first recognised for a series of computer-composed Elevator Girl photographs, created from 1994 to 1999. The origin of this series can be traced to her solo show in 1993, where she originally exhibited two models dressed as elevator operators. The series depicted young women in a unique yet popular elevator costume that can still be seen in Japanese department stores. While these images depict emotionless faces and doll-like postures in unrealistic places generated by computer, they are based on actual places. The series ironically demonstrates, using technology that was at the time cutting-edge, a social impasse caused by Japan’s rapid economic growth, its repetitive system of production, and the presence of female labour at commercial sites that stands in contrast to industrial factories where masculine labour was dominant. In this series of works, each female figure looks like a robot, but collectively they point towards a possible society that departed from the one in which masculine discipline prevailed, and which led to economic growth.

Starting from the “Elevator Girl” series, the theme women’s gendered role in Japanese society evolved in her artistic practice. Starting in 2000, Yanagi widened the scope of this theme with the series “My Grandmothers,” which deals with ageism. The creation of this series began by conducting interviews with girls and young women aged between 14 and 20. Yanagi asked them to imagine what they would be, or what they dream of being in 50 years. Based on these conversations between the models and the artist, Yanagi took pictures of individual images of the older versions of the women and finally turned them into a portrait work. Sentences that these aged figures were imagined to have uttered are juxtaposed with the photo works. Each one was an inversion of the strong Japanese norm of younger equalling better, especially for women. Instead, they demonstrated various ways to live and the kind of strength that comes from the ageing process in the female life cycle.

The “Fairy Tale” (2004–2006) series depicts girls in scenes taken from fables and narratives handed down through generations, such as Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and The Little Match Girl. These works depicted slightly scary scenes in grey tones set abandoned places. Like “My Grandmothers,” girls wearing masks of old and young women appeared playing both roles, thereby turning fantasy images of female figures in fables on their head.

While presenting her solo show Miwa Yanagi: My Grand Mothers at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Miwa Yanagi: Po-Po Nyang Nyang! at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, in 2009, Yanagi was selected to show her works at the Japan Pavilion in the 53rd Venice Biennale. For this she created a new installation, Windswept Women (2009), composed of five large-scale photographs and one video. In the photos, women with physical features both young and old presented strong figures in the wilderness. Wild goddess-like figures also appeared in the video installed in a black tent in the Japan Pavilion, which was covered by another black tent. Seemingly connected with the previous series, this led Yanagi to start theatrical projects that were performed in theatres, art museums and outdoor settings. One of these projects, The Wings of the Sun (2016), used a decorated trailer as the main stage, which Yanagi later developed in Taiwan, designing and showing it for the first time at the Yokohama Triennale 2014. Using the trailer, she created an outdoor performance based on a novel by Kenji Nakagami that involved not only actors, but also tap dancers, pole dancers and circus performers. In the play, seven old women who were forced to leave their familiar alleyway travelled with young men from the same alleyway (this being the term the writer used for the buraku outcast community in Shingu where Nakagami was born and raised). The gender roles of these characters were exaggerated, and they had crazy parties at places they travelled to on their pilgrimage. It was in this play that local faith, community, and tradition in Japan took on another shape inspired by old fables, in which humour, sorrow, and eroticism intermingled with powerful performances that combined various genres.

Yanagi won the 30th Kyoto Arts and Culture Prize in 2017 and the Distinguished Service Prize at the 33rd Kyoto Prefecture Cultural Award in 2016.