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.

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.

Her first artworks were produced in 2008, when she was a member of an art collective, Circular File, along with Josh Kline and Jon Santos.

In her practice, Yi uses scent, tactility and perishability as a means to reconfigure the epistemological and sensorial terms of a predominantly visual art world.

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.

4'' created in 2014 for her exhibit "Divorce" at 47 Canal, she injected live Snails with oxytocin.

Yi cites writing as a primary element of her practice.

In an interview with Ross Simonini, she explained, "Writing is one of my primary tools. I often discover my thoughts about the work through writing. Syntax, sentence structure . . . these things really help. I write a lot of backstory for my sculptures, as if they’re characters in a novel or screenplay. I share this writing with friends, but no one else sees it. I’m not really a visual person. I don’t think in images. I don’t sketch things. I don’t use visual references as much as I should. It’s a huge handicap for me. My writing doesn’t capture the idea for the work as a sketch would. So maybe I’m not working in the most productive way. My starting point is verbal."

She has also described her process as similar to, but an inverted version of, the scientific process employed in science labs.

"Scientists have their hypothesis and then spend the next 20 or 30 years of their career trying to prove it, whereas artists won’t really understand what their hypothesis was until the end of their career."

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".

Yi was the winner of the biannual 2016 Hugo Boss Prize presented by the Guggenheim.

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.

In a video produced by the Guggenheim, Yi explains that "You're dealing with a society that is overly obsessed with cleanliness. And that's partially why I do work with bacteria as a material. Especially in the West, we have this morbid fear of pungent aromas, of bacteria. I'm giving a kind of visualization to people's anxieties about all the germs and bacteria that are proliferating all around us."

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.

In the story, this plant is thought to have medicinal properties, so it is appealing to the pharmaceutical industry.

The film considers themes ranging from bioengineering to imperialism.

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."

Yi often manipulates these unconventional materials, sometimes completely transforming them, as in the case of kombucha which she fermented into leather-like material.

For a work entitled ''verbatem?

verbatom?

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.

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.