Kazuki Yasuo was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture and graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1936 where he was a pupil of Fujishima Takeji (1865-1943). He won awards for his work while still in school from the Bunten and from the Kokugakai-ten, an artists' society that he joined 1940. Recruited into the army in 1943 he became a prisoner-of-war in Siberia, an experience of extreme hardship and deprivation that was to provide, perhaps paradoxically, artistic inspiration for the rest of his life. Many of his Siberia series of paintings, the war-theme group to which Winterfields belongs, were exhibited at the Yamaguchi Prefectorial Museum in an exhibition entitled Kazuki Yasuo, Siberia Series, from 1989-90.

Kazuki's professional career resumed after the war in 1949 with the 23rd Kokugakai-ten exhibition in which he showed a work entitled Burial, another of the aforementioned war-related series of paintings. His work was recognized early on by the collector Fukushima Shigetaro, and by the painter Umehara Ryuzaburo (1888-1986). Umehara was the first to appreciate Kazuki's talents and strongly encouraged him to continue painting when he returned from Siberia.

In 1953 Kazuki traveled to Europe, and in 1969 he received the Taisho award. His work is in many collections including the Tokyo Modern Art Museum and the Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum.

In 1962 Kazuki wrote "my works are highly intimate, because they are a record of my experience... My prisoner-of-war experiences provide almost unlimited topics for my painting. By continuing to paint from these memories, I feel my burden is slowly lifted and my spiritual peace restored. Without doubt, my favorite subject, "soil," owes much to my experiences in the vast continent of Northeastern Asia, where sun, soil, and the moon dominate the entire landscape. While I was living intimately in such an overwhelming atmosphere, I became convinced that as long as there are the sun and the soil for an artist to paint, he will have no trouble settling anywhere in the world."