Born 1965 in Osaka (Japan), based in Osaka and Kyoto (Japan)

Taking as the source of his creative practice the site of the Osaka Expo which he experienced as a child, in other words, "the ruins of the future," Yanobe skilfully weaves together subculture design aesthetics with narrative qualities to make large mechanical sculptures of robots, everyday necessities and so on. In the 1990s he attracted notice with a fin de siècle survival project that included donning an 《 Atom Suit 》 of his own creation fitted with a Geiger counter and visiting Chernobyl in the wake of the nuclear disaster there. With the dawning of a new century however he has shifted the theme of his practice to one of revival, at the same time taking the sun as a symbol, presenting powerfully positive messages and imaginative offerings for the next generation in works that include 《 Standa 》, a three-meter doll standing up on two legs, and a plan to resuscitate a tower of life from pieces of the dismantled Expo tower. For his Mythos exhibition at the Nizayama Forest Art Museum in 2010 Yanobe created 《 Catastrophic Flood 》, an installation consisting of five tons of water dripped into a giant pitcher suspended from the ceiling, then released all at once, sending a shiver down the spine with a work that takes an incisive, almost prophetic cut at the times in which we live. Then, following the Great East Japan Earthquake, as a monument to hope he unveiled 《 Sun Child 》, a six-meter standing figure of a child with the helmet of his protective suit removed. Sun Child is currently touring internationally, traveling from the Tower of the Sun plaza in Osaka and Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall in Tokyo to locations such as Moscow and Israel.