Australian-Japanese artist unit Ken + Julia Yonetani create large-scale installations that often relate to environmental issues. They began their artistic collaboration in 2008 and have created a wide range of works utilizing salt, sugar, uranium glass, and other materials, related to environmental catastrophes such as the decline of Australia’s largest river system (the Murray-Darling Basin), the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. Their installations are often monumental, immersive experiences and frequently reference items of luxury. Their work has gained international attention for its combination of unusual materials and dramatic beauty, and for touching on contemporary issues in a way that is interactive, engaging and visually stunning.

Ken + Julia Yonetani have exhibited across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. Their work is held in major public and private collections and they are represented by Mizuma Gallery (Singapore and Tokyo). They are based in Sydney and Kyoto.

Can you tell us about your ANAT Synapse residency and where the research has led you?

With support from ANAT Synapse, we spent three months living in Mildura and working with scientists and mappers with an intimate knowledge of the environment, in particular the issue of salinization and the health of the Murray-Darling River and its surrounding habitat. This gave us an invaluable opportunity to combine the gaining of scientific knowledge with hands-on fieldwork, undertaking research into the challenges faced not only by scientists but also other key stakeholders, such as farmers. We came to view agriculture as a complex system, at the core of which is also the consumer. Within the current market and distribution system, it is very difficult for the individual farmer to implement a regenerative framework, though it is also still vital to try. 

Our resulting work was Still Life: The food bowl. We sought to engage a wide audience by communicating clearly but also subtly the predicament of sustaining communities in a fragile economic and natural environment. The work expressed the complexity of interactions between the agricultural and natural world. During Palimpsest #8, Sept 9-11 2011, it was displayed in the Rio Vista, the original homestead of the Chaffey Brothers who brought irrigation to Mildura. Our journey with salt did not end there, but developed into an entire series of large-scale installations that have travelled the world and been shown in major institutions across four continents. In expanding the work, we also sought to expand the themes, using salt as a metaphor for life, death, environmental degradation and the politics and economics of food production.

What is the biggest challenge of being an interdisciplinary artist?

The biggest challenge for us as artists these days is actually pretty similar to the challenge facing every farmer – how, within an increasingly unequal and monopolistic market system, can you produce what you want to and dream for? Are you there simply to increase your profit margin and/or your visibility, or if there is another agenda, is it in any way viable? We are all dancing to the same tune, posting our work onto platforms to feed into the algorithmic universe, hoping for a break so we can enjoy some kind of financial independence, and maybe secretly wishing we could change the music.

What kind of mentor-mentee relationships have you experienced throughout your years of practice? Is there any particular mentor or mentee that stood out for you?

The person who made our ANAT Synapse residency possible was the curator, Helen Vivian. What is so remarkable about her curation is that she actually envisaged the entire project and then had the recourses and perseverance necessary to make it happen. She apparently first discovered our practice in Venice in 2009, and was supposedly immediately struck by the use of sugar to make a work of great beauty with a powerful environmental theme in the form of our work Sweet Barrier Reef. From there she went out of her way and took the creative leap to envisaging a work that also dealt with environmental issues through the material of salt. From one phone call, the entire project emerged and took on a life of its own. She sent us some salt from Mildura and asked if we might be interested in working with it for Palimpsest #8, which she was curating. She also suggested we apply for the ANAT Synapse grant and assisted us with invaluable local contacts.

As an interdisciplinary artist, who and what are your biggest influences?

We are probably more influenced by things outside of the contemporary art world per se. We love movies, and a lot of our works reference back to history or cinema, such as What the Birds Knew (2012), which is actually the name of a Kurosawa Akira film. We are always watching new movies and gaining inspiration from them. We love satire. The recent Korean film Concrete Utopia (2023) comes to mind. They can be metaphors for contemporary crises, depicting complex issues with subtlety, drama and humour.

What are you working on at the moment?

I am guessing this is not the answer you are expecting, but right at the moment, we are actually busy harvesting our black bean Edamame, a delicacy in Japan. We have around one thousand plants. 

After making a lot of artwork that was related to agriculture and the environment, we decided to put “our money where our mouth is,” excuse the very bad pun, and around ten years ago began a small project hoping to farm our own food sustainably. Many of our artworks dealt with the issues of agriculture and food, including of course Still Life as well as our other salt works, such as The Last Supper and The Last Suppermaket. After the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, we became even more obsessed with “food safety.” A definite paranoia. 

We initially ended up in the countryside outside of Kyoto for the studio space. Hard to understand in any other context, in the kind of depopulated Japanese “limited village” where we planted ourselves, people actually pay upkeep fees to lend out their farmland. While we didn’t receive money, the locals were happy to let us use the worst plots of vacant farmland for free. Even when living in suburbia, we had been especially skilled at killing any vegetables we tried to grow, so you can understand for us this was an “art project” of epic proportions, to try and undertake organic farming. 

Of course, “vacant” land is actually a euphemism for “weed-infested muddy swamp overrun by deer and wild boars.” The first stage of our “farming” art project was making an affordable fence that kept at least most of the roaming wildlife out (don’t get us started on the monkeys). Then as if hammering in hundreds of fence piles didn’t already cause severe repetitive strain injury, we embarked on planting just under one acre of rice by hand. With no tractor and no truck, we piled thousands of seedlings into our tiny hatchback. Behind that polite nonchalant Japanese veneer, at first, our neighbours looked on with a mixture of amusement and disbelief. Our art performance had reached a fever pitch and was apparently immensely entertaining. 

Our agricultural project has continued in between artist residencies and exhibitions, and grown through the years (we now have an old tractor and some other second-hand machinery). It is known as Rice Valley, because that is what “Yonetani” means in Japanese. We farm over two hectares, planting a combination of rice, wheat, and beans, which we plant as a nitrogen fixer. The beans, through a symbiotic relationship with microorganisms in the soil, help regenerate the soil and also absorb nitrate from the air, rather than relying on fertilisers, a major cause of river pollution and climate change. We do not use any agricultural chemicals.

This year has been especially hard. We feel like at least where we live the tipping point has come and gone, and we are clinging to the edge of some kind of an abyss. That sounds very dramatic, I know. In any case, the weather has been extremely unpredictable, and way too hot and dry for our Adzuki beans. One conventional farmer down the road has forty hectares and not one single bean, due to the extreme heat and complete lack of rain. We will just be happy to get whatever we can, and in some way try to rework the whole experience back into our artwork. Though actually we don’t necessarily separate our farming from our art, for us they are both a part of living together with and responding to the world around us.