Anicka Yi facts for kids

Anicka Yi (born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea) is an artist who creates unique artworks using smells, food, and science. She is famous for her art installations that you can experience with your senses, especially your nose! Anicka Yi often works with biologists and chemists to create her art. She lives and works in New York City.

Anicka Yi's Early Life

Anicka Yi was born in Seoul, South Korea. When she was two years old, her family moved from Korea to the United States, living first in Alabama and then in California. She grew up in a Korean-American home.

After finishing college at Hunter College, Anicka Yi lived in London. For several years, she worked as a fashion stylist and a writer. When she was 30, she started to explore art, combining her interests in perfumes and science. Her first artworks were made in 2008. She was part of an art group called Circular File at that time.

How Anicka Yi Creates Art

Anicka Yi uses smells, touch, and things that don't last long in her art. She wants to change how we usually experience art, which is often just by looking at it. She wants us to use our other senses too.

Unusual Materials She Uses

Yi is known for using strange and often living materials in her art. These can include:

• Flowers fried in tempura batter
• Canvases made from soap
• Stainless-steel shower heads
• Fish oil pills
• Shredded Teva sandals boiled in old powdered milk
• Even bacteria!

One art critic, David Everitt Howe, wrote in 2018 that her "unusual mix of materials" is put together in a way that tells a story about how different parts of our lives shape who we are.

Her Creative Process

Anicka Yi often changes these unusual materials in big ways. For example, she has fermented kombucha (a type of tea) until it became a material that looked like leather. For a piece called verbatem? verbatom? 4 in 2014, she even injected live snails with oxytocin (a hormone).

Yi says that writing is a very important part of her art process. She explained that she often discovers her ideas for art by writing. She writes stories for her sculptures, almost as if they are characters in a book. She shares these writings with friends, but usually no one else sees them. She says she doesn't think much in pictures or draw sketches like many artists. Instead, her ideas start with words.

She also compares her process to how scientists work, but in a different way. Scientists usually have an idea and then spend years trying to prove it. Artists, she says, might not fully understand their main idea until much later in their careers.

Famous Artworks and Shows

You Can Call Me F at The Kitchen

In 2015, Anicka Yi had a show called You Can Call Me F at The Kitchen in New York City. For this artwork, she took samples from 100 women. With help from a scientist named Tal Danino from MIT, she grew bacteria from these samples on a large agar billboard. This artwork was meant to make visitors think about the question, "What does feminism smell like?" Yi wanted this piece to explore the "fear" that some people have about hygiene and women's bodies.

"Life is Cheap" at the Guggenheim Museum

Anicka Yi won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2016, which is a big award given by the Guggenheim Museum. In 2017, she had a special exhibition called Life Is Cheap at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. This show explored her interest in how smells connect to society and politics.

When visitors entered the exhibit, they smelled a special scent created by Yi. It was a mix of the smell of ants and Asian American women, and she named it Immigrant Caucus. In the main gallery, there were two artworks facing each other. Each was like a small, contained world. One piece, called Force Majeure, was in a temperature-controlled space. It had clear tiles covered in agar, where bacteria from Chinatown and Koreatown in Manhattan were growing. The other artwork, Lifestyle Wars, had a colony of ants living on a structure that looked like a computer circuit board. This piece made people think about how society is organized and how technology fits in.

A close-up of Anicka Yi's artwork Lifestyle Wars from her 2017 show "Life is Cheap" at the Guggenheim Museum.

In a video about the show, Yi explained that society is often "too obsessed with cleanliness." She said that in Western countries, people are very afraid of strong smells and bacteria. By using bacteria in her art, she wanted to show people's worries about all the germs around us.

The Flavor Genome (2016) at the Whitney Biennial

In 2017, the Whitney Biennial art show included Anicka Yi's 22-minute 3D video called The Flavor Genome. This video followed a chemist searching for a special plant in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. In the story, this plant was believed to have healing powers, making it interesting to drug companies. The film explored ideas like bioengineering (changing living things) and imperialism (when one country controls another).

58th Venice Biennale (2019)

Anicka Yi showed two sculptures at the 2019 58th Venice Biennale, a famous art event.

• Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble) had glowing, cocoon-like shapes made from dried seaweed. Inside these shapes were robot moths. Their shadows on the walls made it look like they were fluttering. Below these hanging sculptures, there was a wavy concrete base with bubbling pools of water. The surface looked like the moon or another planet, showing how life can grow even in tough places. These tough living things are called extremophiles.
• The other artwork was called Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita). For this, Yi used mud from Venice, Italy, to create what she called Winogradsky panels. These clear frames held soil mixed with other things like egg yolks. This mixture created a Winogradsky column, where bacteria in the soil separated into colorful layers. The results looked like abstract paintings made with the help of tiny living things.

In Love With The World, Hyundai Commission, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Anicka Yi's studio worked with many experts to create a huge project for the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in London. She filled the massive space with "aerobes," which were like drone-like airships. Their movements were controlled by artificial intelligence (AI).

Yi imagined the huge hall as a giant aquarium. She created two types of mechanical creatures to live in it:

• Xenojellies: These had tentacles and could float and move around more freely. They seemed curious about new things.
• Planulae: These were more like tiny amoebas or protists. They mostly hovered near the bottom of the imagined water environment.

These creatures were covered in tiny hair-like parts, like cilia. The aerobes moved around the hall on their own, following certain rules. Sometimes, they would go to a special area to recharge their batteries before rejoining the world Yi had created for them.

Other Interests

Science

Anicka Yi works very closely with scientists at universities, including Columbia University and MIT. She had a special partnership with Tal Danino, a scientist at MIT, during her time there. Together, they developed new biological materials for her art.

Feminism

In many interviews, Anicka Yi has explained that she sees her art, especially her work with smells, as a feminist response. She believes that art often focuses too much on what men want to see. She also talks about how some senses are valued more than others, and she wants people to appreciate the sense of smell more. She has taught herself a lot about perfumes and wants to show that perfumery is an art form, not just something for the beauty industry.

A critic named Jane Yong Kim wrote about Yi's 2015 show at The Kitchen. One piece in the show displayed bacteria from cheek samples taken from over a hundred women. Kim explained that these bacteria represent how women's bodies can sometimes be seen as a source of potential threats, like infections.

Selected Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

• 2011: Excuse Me, Your Necklace Is Leaking, Green Gallery, Milwaukee
• 2011: SOUS-VIDE, 47 Canal, New York
• 2013: Denial, Lars Friedrich, Berlin
• 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
• 2021: In Love WIth The World, Hyundai Commission, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
• 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

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.
• 2016: "Overpop," Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China
• 2017: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
• 2017: "An Inventory of Shimmers," List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
• 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
• 2016: Hugo Boss Prize
• 2023: Creative Capital Awards

Media

Books About Anicka Yi

• 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 Featuring Anicka Yi

• 2014: 'Lonely Samurai'

See Also

In Spanish: Anicka Yi para niños