Shino Yanai creates works based on sociological research, delving into issues of nationality and beauty with an understanding that beauty cannot be separated from force and violence.
In a 2016 project titled “Blue Passages”, Yanai held a performance in which she carried an Olympic torch up the Pyrenees mountain path said to have been followed by Walter Benjamin (Jewish-German thinker) in 1940 in his escape from the Nazis to the seaside town of Portbou, Spain.