Anicka Yi

With unconventional materials such as soap, potato chips, expired powdered milk, snail slime, and tempura-fried flowers, Anicka Yi makes tactile and fragrant sculptures, paintings, and installations that are simultaneously seductive and grotesque, imaginative and rooted in science. The artist often draws on biochemistry, anthropology, and philosophy, exploring themes such artificial intelligence, sexism, migration, and climate change. Fragrance is often at the heart of Yi’s work—a way of subverting the dominant male gaze within the art world. For You Can Call Me F (2015), she worked with a pungent paint derived from bacterial samples culled from 100 Asian American female friends and colleagues. In Auras, Orgasms, and Nervous Peaches (2011), fragrant olive oils leak from the walls of a tiled room. Yi won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2016 and was awarded the Tate Turbine Hall Hyundai Commission in 2020. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and participated in the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Lyon Biennale, and the Gwangju Biennale.