Anicka Yi is, without much argument, one of the most closely watched artists in the world today. Born in Seoul in 1971, she moved to the United States with her family at the age of two. She first confronted people's assumptions about contemporary art with pungent smells, deep-fried tempura flowers, and moldering bacterial colonies in 2011, at Green Gallery in Milwaukee. Fourteen years later, she has gone on to show at the Tate Modern in London, the Guggenheim in New York, the Pinault Collection in Paris, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Leeum Museum, and has firmly entered the top tier of artists working internationally.
(Video and photos: the exhibition "Anicka Yi: Another Evolution," courtesy of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, video by NewAction.) This past March, her first institutional solo show in China opened at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. The exhibition traces fifteen years of her work, bringing together close to forty representative pieces from across her career, including several made specifically for UCCA.
"This is my first time in Beijing — my first time in China, period. The cultural context is entirely new to me, and yet there's a strange sense of familiarity to it," Anicka Yi told us. We met her in Beijing the day after she finished installing the show, and talked about the exhibition and about the singular method she has stuck with throughout her career — using the senses themselves as a way of perceiving art. (Contributing writer: Huang Xirui. Photos: "Anicka Yi: Another Evolution," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025, photographed by Sun Shi.) At the entrance to the show, the first thing we saw was an empty, transparent plastic raincoat suspended on the wall. In its hood sat a cluster of freshly fried tempura flowers, and up close, you could just make out the smell of deep-fried food starting to turn.
Opening with this piece, "A Taxi Driver for GG," was a deliberate choice on Anicka Yi's part. Although it is an early work, it lays down the central threads of material and idea that would run through her entire career: transparency, absence, fermentation, smell.
(Anicka Yi, "Sister," 2011.) The empty raincoat is a study in absence-as-presence, while the withering, greasy fried flowers standing in for a head suggest death and mourning. She told us that an earlier piece in the same series, "Sister," used a red sweater to carry the same idea.
"In my work, the 'body' tends to show up indirectly — through residue, vapor, unstable materials — rather than through a fixed image. The body is never fully present in the space; it's always in flux, metabolizing, leaking, receding. I'm interested in how material can stand in for the body, carrying its emotional and sensory charge — especially through decay, evaporation, and smell."
Past that piece, we entered a long, narrow corridor lit in a sickly white, like the inside of some mutated space capsule. Before we'd even reached the second work, visitors around us were already flaring their nostrils, trying to place a smell hanging faintly in the air — not quite perfume, not quite food, more like the residue left behind by some chemical reaction: metal, ocean, seaweed, citrus, something animal, mixed with gasoline and flowers.
That, too, turned out to be a work: "Walking Two Paths Simultaneously," a scent Anicka Yi created with the perfumer Barnabé Fillion specifically for UCCA.
"The scent you're smelling was designed to drift slowly along the curved entry corridor. It arrives before the visual does, preparing your body to enter the exhibition — it's part of the foundation of perception itself," the artist said.
The exhibition's large new installation, "Another You," was also made specifically for this show. Green cylindrical petri dishes are layered with fine speckles of yellow, green, and blue, stretching downward as if without end. Working with biologists at Beijing Normal University, the artist cultivated bacterial colonies in a Beijing lab using DNA material spliced from marine organisms — coral, jellyfish. The colored specks visible in the piece are these genetically modified, oddly mesmerizing microorganisms.
Visitors can't touch them, but the traces of their growth are plainly visible. The bacterial solutions were genetically edited by a collaborating team at the University of California, then carried from New York to Beijing, where biologists at the School of Life Sciences at Beijing Normal University dropped and cultured them before they were finally installed in the gallery.
Anicka Yi told us she has a particular fascination with bioluminescent organisms, so these bacteria were originally designed to glow. But set inside an installation that already emitted light, the effect became too stylized — closer to neon signage or a glow-in-the-dark poster — and it undercut the meditative mood she was after.
"So we switched to non-luminous pigmented bacteria — something more subtle, more restrained. I've always been drawn to microorganisms. They work for me both as physical material and as a conceptual lens — a way of holding memory, labor, and speculative potential all at once."
(Anicka Yi, from the "Radiolaria" series, detail.) Her fascination with luminous organisms also shows up in another piece: a sprawling colony of "radiolarians." Individual mechanical radiolarians, each glowing white and each a different shape, stretch out their tentacles and skeletal forms in a pitch-black gallery — heavily cyborg in feel, like ancient species that had somehow kept evolving into some future world.
"The 'Radiolaria' series takes its cue from radiolarians, single-celled marine microorganisms that have existed for hundreds of millions of years. In nature these protists build intricate silica skeletons that let them take on remarkably varied forms. I didn't copy any specific species — each sculpture reads like its own organism: part machine, part insect shell, part branching nerve network, part fiber-optic texture," the artist told us. We noticed visitors lingering in front of these kinetic sculptures for a long time — not really trying to figure them out, just waiting to see what they might do next.
Another group of works, the "Kelp Pods" series, produced the same kind of reaction. Seen from a distance, these beige, cocoon-shaped sculptures look like sleeping insect eggs, with dark shadows flickering inside them — sometimes fluttering, sometimes still. Anicka Yi said the pods conceal simple mechanical devices; the fluttering "moths" we see inside are programmed movements.
She calls this "life-like motion" — not an imitation of nature, but something designed to trigger an illusion about where the boundary of life actually sits. Interestingly, when she first conceived the "Kelp Pods," she hadn't planned to include the moths at all; they were added later, as a kind of deliberate interference.
"The original structure was too complete. I needed to introduce some chaos, to loosen it up." That's because she believes an ecosystem shouldn't be closed and stable — it should be full of collision, error, and instability.
Wherever it appears in the gallery — as a monumental sculpture, or as a transparent installation — and across fifteen years of work, the fried flower is the one thread in Anicka Yi's practice that has changed the least.
"The fried flower was the earliest material I used to push against conventional beauty, and to preserve certain ideas about gender and narrative. Flowers usually stand for romance and femininity, but once they've been fried they turn greasy, pungent, abject — they suggest a body that's porous, fragile, leaking," she told us.
In an early piece like "A Taxi Driver for GG," the fried flowers spill out of the garment as a disruptive element, a raw and exposed gesture. But over time, in series like "Biologizing the Machine" and the tempura-flower works, they've merged with industrial materials — silicone, wax, tubing, resin — into something far more complex.
The fried flowers we saw in the show, though ultimately sealed inside resin, still hold onto a memory of impermanence — a memory that is private, personal, and points to a quiet, persistent ache Anicka Yi has carried her whole life as a Korean American immigrant. "I knew from a very young age that I smelled different," she said, meaning the smell of Korean food. She moved to the United States with her family at two and grew up in Alabama, where her school lunches — kimchi, gimbap, grilled meat — carried smells strong enough that classmates often mocked her for them.
She never fully shook that experience of being marked by smell — not a difference visible to the eye, but a cultural rejection that started in the nose.
"That's when I realized perception is itself a socialized language — and that language doesn't always welcome you in." That's precisely why the elements running through this exhibition — smell, fermentation, evaporation, media that images alone can't carry — have become the materials she reaches for most.
Anicka Yi is drawn to matter that goes unnamed, matter that is residue, matter written off as low — grease, bacteria, mold, even insects, dead skin, congealed liquid. The huge, transparent plastic-wrapped piece "Biologizing the Machine" and the "Life Support Tent" series in the exhibition put this "low material" to use directly — microbial metabolism coexisting with human life.
Inside the sealed environment of "Biologizing the Machine," yeast, mold, and bacteria ferment away like a human stomach, while visitors are kept on the far side of a transparent membrane that looks almost ready to burst from the fermentation gases inside; the "Life Support Tent" series, meanwhile, resembles a set of makeshift forensic scenes, each tent packed with a seemingly random assortment of objects — from raw ingredients to consumer goods — with bacterial strains fermenting in petri dishes, giving off a faint sour, rotting smell that forms the work's basic "metabolic structure."
(Photo: Anicka Yi making a fried flower in her studio.) She told us that these bacteria-culture-like spaces in the show are essentially a portrait of her studio. "My studio isn't a formal lab, but there's always some kind of biological experiment running — cultivating algae, growing mushrooms, making bacterial paintings, keeping pet snails."
Right now, a corner of her studio holds a large Winogradsky column in progress (a setup that grows nitrifying microbes in a medium with no organic matter at all), while several kombucha SCOBYs are slowly turning into what's called "kombucha leather." That leather — a translucent material produced by microbes fermenting sugar and black tea — is visible in the exhibition too; it's a material she has returned to again and again.
"My mornings start quietly, with reading or meditation, and then I go to the studio. Some days I'm testing materials — developing a scent, culturing bacteria, monitoring something in progress. Other days I'm writing, editing, reading, or meeting with collaborators from the sciences or tech." That non-linear rhythm mirrors the way her work itself evolves — cross-disciplinary, iterative, rarely on a fixed schedule. Her worktable is stacked with scientific papers, philosophy books, scent samples, and, on her computer, AI-generated images in progress.
(Anicka Yi, "Every Branch of Coral Holds Up the Moonlight" (still), 2024.) "AI functions almost like an extension of my studio's consciousness — a way of processing my own body of work," Anicka Yi said. The exhibition piece "Every Branch of Coral Holds Up the Moonlight" is a direct collaboration between her and an AI system.
On a screen fourteen meters long and four meters high, we saw images unmistakably close to her own work — microorganisms, tentacles, brilliantly colored sea creatures. That's because she trained the AI system exclusively on her own past work, turning it into a strange, endlessly inventive mirror that never repeats itself.
"I don't use AI to get answers — I use it to raise different questions. And no, I don't see it as a threat, and I've never used it to try to work faster," the artist said. For someone whose imagination runs this far afield, Anicka Yi didn't come up through a formal art education. Before becoming an artist, she worked in London as a fashion stylist and copywriter. It wasn't until she was around thirty, when her friend Margaret Lee founded the artist-run space 47 Canal and invited her to make something, that she began working as an artist at all.
That was the beginning of her art practice.
"I discovered I had a natural instinct for combining materials — sculpture, installation, sensory environments. It felt like discovering a language I'd already known without realizing it," Anicka Yi said.
Rather than chase a single fixed identity, she's more concerned with the large questions that guide her work: how to perceive the agency of non-human life, the dissolving of binaries like nature and technology, human and machine. Smell, bacteria, AI — the materials shift over time, but the framework underneath stays constant, a self-contained system able to metabolize itself, exactly as the exhibition's title suggests: another evolution.
When we asked what she hoped Chinese audiences would take away from the show, she said: "I don't have any particular reaction in mind. I just hope the exhibition opens up a new layer of perception — what counts as intelligence? How do we define life? And how is sensory experience itself shaped by culture and power?" Across this string of small chambers built like field research stations, Anicka Yi is inviting visitors to wander, observe, and metabolize.
"China's deep traditions in philosophy and science speak directly to the concerns in my work. I hope this exhibition sparks conversation, and that it stays open-ended — I'm not after a conclusion, only hoping to expand how you perceive and imagine."