Anicka Yi

Anicka Yi (born 1971 in Seoul, South Korea) is a conceptual artist whose work lies at the intersection of fragrance, cuisine, and science. She is known for installations that engage the senses, especially the sense of smell; and, for her collaborations with biologists and chemists. Yi lives and works in New York City.

Early life When she was two, Yi's family moved from Korea to Alabama and then to California. Her father is a Protestant minister and her mother works at a biomedical corporation. She has stated that she grew up in a Korean-American home.

After she graduated from Hunter College, she lived in London, where she freelanced for several years doing work as a fashion stylist and copywriter. It was at the age of 30 that she began to experiment with art, as she explored her interests in perfumery and science.

Materials Yi is known for her use of unorthodox, often living and perishable materials, including: tempura-fried flowers, canvases fashioned from soap, stainless-steel shower heads, fish oil pills, shredded Teva sandals boiled in recalled powdered milk, and bacteria. David Everitt Howe in Art Review wrote in 2018 that this "incongruous mix of media" is “arranged into something elegantly allegorical about the various industries that constitute our identity."

Process Yi often manipulates these unconventional materials, sometimes completely transforming them, as in the case of kombucha which she fermented into leather-like material. Yi co-taught a class at Stanford University as with her studio manager Remina Greenfield and Stanford lecturer Miguel Novelo called "Metaspore: The Networked Sensorium" . There, she taught a class that brought together STEM PhDs and those with art and filmmaking background to deconstruct human exceptionalism, techno-bio-sphere, deep time and network theory.

Select works and exhibitions

You Can Call Me F at The Kitchen In her 2015 show at The Kitchen in New York City, You Can Call Me F, Yi took swabs from 100 women and with the help of MIT synthetic biologist Tal Danino cultivated the bacteria in an agar billboard that “assaults visitors” to help answer the question “What does feminism smell like?" Each woman was given the choice to where she would take a swab from her body, which ranged from the mouth to the vagina. She and Danino developed this work through "The Art and Science of Bacteria" a workshop they led during her residency at MIT. She explained that she wanted this work to explore the "patriarchal fear" surrounding hygiene and the female body. In the exhibition, Yi aimed to represent women's bodies in the form of smells rather than sights, denouncing what New Yorker writer Andrea K. Scott writes as "salacious male expectations". In 2017, Yi debuted at the Guggenheim with the exhibition Life Is Cheap, which explores her "sociopolitical interest in the olfactive."

In the entrance of this exhibit, visitors encountered an aroma designed by the artist to be a hybrid scent of ants and Asian American women and named Immigrant Caucus. The central gallery space had two works facing each other with distinct, contained biospheres. One work, enclosed in a temperature-regulated space, Force Majeure features plexiglass tiles covered in agar on which bacteria, sourced from Chinatown and Koreatown in Manhattan, grow. The other work, Lifestyle Wars contains a colony of ants on a structure that resembles a circuit board, referencing the organization of society and the relationship of technology to this ordering.

The Flavor Genome (2016) at the Whitney Biennial The 2017 Whitney Biennial included Yi's 22-minute 3D video entitled The Flavor Genome, which follows a chemist searching through the Brazilian Amazon for a special plant. The film considers themes ranging from bioengineering to imperialism.

58th Venice Biennale (2019) Yi's contribution to the group exhibition "May You Live in Interesting Times" at the 2019 Venice Biennale consisted of two sculptural installations. Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble) featured a grouping of illuminated cocoon-like pods made from stretched strips of dried kelp, which contained animatronic moths, whose shadows cast on the walls of the pods signify their fluttering presence. Beneath the pods, a curvaceous concrete base was marked by burbling ponds of water, housed in craters that sit at the foot of each pendant sculpture. The surface recalls the lunar landscape or, perhaps, that of another celestial body, gesturing towards the evolution of life, despite all, in inhospitable locales—what biologists call extremophiles.

The other component of Yi's Biennale entry was titled Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita), and used mud from the area around Venice, Italy, in order to create what the artist calls Winogradsky panels. These acrylic frames house the soil mixed with calcium carbonate, calcium sulfate, egg yolks, and cellulose in order to create a Winogradsky column, wherein bacteria within the soil sample separate into colorful gradients of aerobic and anaerobic strata. The results resemble abstract paintings that are created with the aid of one of humanities many helper species, which themselves figure largely in Yi's work.

In Love With The World, Hyundai Commission, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yi's studio, in collaboration with numerous technical specialists, mounted an ambitious project to fill the massive space of the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall with "aerobes": drone-like dirigibles whose movements were guided by artificial intelligence. Yi conceived of the hall's cavernous expanse as a kind of aquarium and she created two different types of mechanical organisms to inhabit it: xenojellies, which are tentacular, as well as more buoyant and mobile, exhibiting curiosity in foreign bodies. The other form of organism is a planulae, which is similar to an amoeba or protist, and its movements are restricted to hovering about near the bottom of the imagined aqueous environment. These forms are coated in tiny hairlike protrusions, meant to evoke cilia. Within a set of predetermined parameters, the aerobes moved about the hall according to movements of their own design, occasionally nesting in a maintenance area to have their batteries recharged, before rejoining the biosphere the artist devised as their environment. She has also commented on the gendered hierarchies of the senses, arguing for the revaluation of the sense of smell. In the writings of critics such as Hsuan Hsu and Rachel Lee, Yi's work has also been understood at the intersection of critiques of both racial discrimination and gender inequality.

Critic Jane Yong Kim wrote about her 2015 show at The Kitchen, which included a piece displaying the organic matter from cheek swabs taken from over hundred women. Kim explains that these bacteria represent how women's bodies can pose threats from the potential for such bacteria to cause infections. Some strategies she uses in her exhibits, such as You Can Call Me F, a New Yorker writer described to be reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp.

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

2011: Excuse Me, Your Necklace Is Leaking, Green Gallery, Milwaukee 2014: Divorce, 47 Canal, New York 2014: Death, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH 2015: 6,070,430K of Digital Spit, List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA 2015: 7,070,430K of Digital Spit, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland 2016: Jungle Stripe, Fridericianum, Kassel 2017: Life Is Cheap, 2016 Hugo Boss Prize, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2022: Metaspore, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan 2023: The Postnatal Egg, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana 2024: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art 2025: Anicka Yi, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, Texas

Group exhibitions

2010: "179 Canal / Anyways," White Columns, New York, NY 2011: "Inside/Outside: Dressing the Monument," Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee, WI 2011: "Looking Back," The 6th White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York, NY 2012: "A Disagreeable Object," Sculpture Center, New York, NY 2012: "THE LOG-O-RITHMIC," Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy 2013: "Some End of Things," Kunstmuseum Basel—Gegenwart, Basel, Switzerland 2013: "Meanwhile...Suddenly and Then," 12. Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France 2013: "Love of Technology," Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL 2014: "The Great Acceleration," Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan 2015: "Inhuman," Fridericianum, Kassel 2015: "NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection," Rubell Museum, Miami, FL 2016: "The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?)," 11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea 2016: "NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection," National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. 2017: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 2017: "The Dream of Forms," Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France 2017: "Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon," New Museum, New York, NY 2018: "Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today," The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA 2018: "In Tune with the World," Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France 2018: "The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness," The Kitchen, New York, NY 2019: "May You Live in Interesting Times," Venice Biennale 2019, Venice, Italy 2019: "New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-first Century," Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY 2019: "The Body Electric," Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN 2019: "Producing Futures: An Exhibition on Post-Cyber-Feminisms," Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland 2020: "Psychic Wounds: On Art & Trauma," The Warehouse, Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX 2021: "Catastrophe and Recovery," National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea 2022: "Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere," List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA

Awards and honors 2011: The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award 2014-2015: Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology

Media

Books 2015: Anicka Yi: 6,070,430K of Digital Spit (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center). 2021: Anicka Yi: In Love With The World (London: Tate). 2022: Anicka Yi: Metaspore (Milan: Pirelli HangarBicocca).

Podcasts 2014: 'Lonely Samurai'

Other activities Yi was part of the jury that selected Stephanie Dinkins for the 2023 LG Guggenheim Award, an international art prize established as part of a long-term global partnership between LG Group and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to recognize groundbreaking artists in technology-based art.