Anicka Yi facts for kids

Anicka Yi is a fascinating artist born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea. She creates unique art that mixes smells, food, and science. Her art often uses scents to make you think and feel. She also works with scientists to make her amazing art. Anicka Yi lives and works in New York City.

Early Life and Art Journey

When Anicka Yi was two years old, her family moved from Korea to Alabama and then to California. She grew up in a Korean-American home.

After college, she lived in London and worked as a fashion stylist and writer. When she was 30, she started making art. She was very interested in perfumes and science. Her first artworks were made in 2008.

What Anicka Yi's Art Is Like

Anicka Yi's art uses smells, touch, and things that change over time. She wants to make us experience art with more than just our eyes.

Unusual Materials in Her Art

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

• Flowers fried in tempura batter.
• Canvases made from soap.
• Fish oil pills.
• Shredded Teva sandals boiled in old milk.
• Even bacteria!

One art critic said her mix of materials tells a story about how different industries shape who we are.

How She Creates Her Art

Anicka Yi often changes these unusual materials completely. For example, she has fermented kombucha tea into a material that looks like leather. For one artwork, she even injected live snails with a special chemical called oxytocin.

Writing is a very important part of her art process. She writes stories for her sculptures, almost like they are characters in a book. She says she doesn't think in pictures or sketch much. She finds her ideas through words.

She also compares her art process to how scientists work, but in reverse. Scientists start with an idea and try to prove it. Artists, she says, often only understand their main idea at the end of their career.

Amazing 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 project, she worked with a scientist named Tal Danino from MIT. They collected tiny samples (swabs) from 100 women. Then, they grew the bacteria from these samples on a large agar billboard.

Yi wanted to explore what feminism might smell like. She also wanted to challenge ideas about cleanliness and women's bodies. She aimed to show women's bodies through smells instead of just how they look.

"Life is Cheap" at the Guggenheim Museum

Anicka Yi won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2016. This led to her exhibition Life Is Cheap at the Guggenheim Museum in 2017. This show explored her interest in how smells relate to society and politics.

At the entrance, visitors smelled a special aroma. Yi created it to be a mix of ants and Asian American women, calling it Immigrant Caucus. Inside the main gallery, there were two unique artworks.

• One work, Force Majeure, had plexiglass tiles covered in agar. On this agar, bacteria collected from Chinatown and Koreatown in Manhattan grew.
• The other work, Lifestyle Wars, featured a colony of ants living on a structure that looked like a computer circuit board. This artwork 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 at the Guggenheim.

Yi explained that people in Western countries are often very worried about being clean and about germs. She uses bacteria in her art to show people's worries about all the tiny germs around us.

The Flavor Genome (2016) at the Whitney Biennial

The 2017 Whitney Biennial featured Yi's 22-minute 3D video called The Flavor Genome. The video follows a chemist searching for a special plant in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. This plant is believed to have healing powers, which makes it interesting to drug companies. The film explores ideas about changing living things and powerful countries taking resources.

58th Venice Biennale (2019)

At the 2019 Venice Biennale, Anicka Yi showed two sculptures.

• Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble) had glowing, cocoon-like pods made from dried seaweed. Inside, there were robot moths whose shadows fluttered on the walls. Below the pods, a curvy concrete base had bubbling pools of water. This part looked like a moon surface, suggesting how life can grow even in tough places.
• The other artwork, Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita), used mud from Venice, Italy. She mixed the mud with other things like egg yolks to create "Winogradsky panels." These panels showed how bacteria in the soil separate into colorful layers. They 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 created a huge project for the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. She filled the massive space with "aerobes." These were drone-like flying objects guided by artificial intelligence. Yi imagined the hall as a giant aquarium. She made two types of mechanical creatures:

• "Xenojellies" were like curious, floating jellyfish with tentacles.
• "Planulae" were like tiny amoebas that hovered near the bottom.

These creatures were covered in tiny hair-like parts. They moved around the hall on their own, sometimes going to a charging area before rejoining their environment.

Other Areas of Her Work

Science

Anicka Yi works closely with scientists at universities like Columbia University and MIT. She collaborated a lot with Tal Danino at MIT. Together, they developed new biological materials for her art.

Feminism

Yi often explains that her art, especially her use of smell, is a feminist response to art that focuses only on what people see. She believes that the sense of smell is often seen as less important than sight. She wants to show that smell, like perfume, can be a serious art form, not just part of the beauty industry. Her work also explores ideas about fairness for different races and genders.

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 Her Work

• 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

Anicka Yi was part of the group that chose Stephanie Dinkins for the 2023 LG Guggenheim Award. This is an international art prize that celebrates artists who use technology in new ways.

See also

In Spanish: Anicka Yi para niños