{"id":7295,"date":"2024-12-14T10:13:33","date_gmt":"2024-12-14T15:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dfabclass.com\/intro\/?p=7295"},"modified":"2025-01-15T07:45:49","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T12:45:49","slug":"biotechnology-and-the-art-of-anicka-yi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dfabclass.com\/intro\/biotechnology-and-the-art-of-anicka-yi\/","title":{"rendered":"Biotechnology and the Art of Anicka Yi"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Anikca Yi is a Korean-American conceptual artist who explores the connections between biology and technology.  Yi has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and Kunsthalle Basel. Her work has appeared in the Venice Biennale in 2019 and the Whitney Biennial in 2017. She won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2016 and was a fellow at the Center for Art Science and Technology at MIT.  In 2021 was invited to be the artist for Tate Modern\u2019s annual Hundai Commission, a stage for international artists to create a site-specifc installation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Background<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anicka Yi was born into a middle-class family in Seoul South Korea in 1971. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her father worked as a Protestant pastor and her mother, from whom her curiosity about chemistry and biology seems to come, worked in a biomedical company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the age of 2 the whole family moved to Alabama (US) and shortly after to California where she grew up. She studied at the public university Hunter College in New York and after graduating she went to live in London where she worked in matters related to fashion and advertising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the age of thirty she made the leap towards conceptual art in which fragrances, cooking and science converge. She was always fascinated by the world of smells and opted to create aromatic works. She is distinguished by the preeminence of the senses of smell and touch in her installations. The visual aspect of art-making is secondary for Yi who believes that art has been visual and eminently masculine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exploration of Material<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Yi\u2019s works, in which the air is part of the work, the public interacts even if they don’t want to (since you can’t stop breathing or feeling). The artist intentionally provokes emotions by making the viewer confront their fears of dirt and illness with works made of perishable materials that decompose, bacteria that have multiplied, and smells that cannot be ignored (such as the smell of sweat). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her installations show biological processes in progress, they teach decomposition as it is happening. The smells are powerful and inevitable. Yi is a specialist in pieces made with living organisms that show unpleasant realities and with which she proposes drawing a parallel with the socio-political: there is a patriarchal fear of feminine odor and women’s hygiene. Smell is more subtle but has incredible powers to transport people to places and moments. Perfume has always been related to beauty and she wants to go further and go to not so delicious smells to highlight some aromas and make them a feminist tool. There have always been hierarchies both between the senses (sight was always first) and in society (where men were superior to women).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Process\/Inspiration<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anika Yi, experiments with microbiology. She creates art works with bacteria, mushrooms and machines. But for her installation in the Tate In Love With the World<\/em>, she was inspired by synthetic biology, which was programmed to emulate the fungal intelligence of microorganisms like mushrooms and jellyfish. For the appearance of the creatures in this piece, Yi was inspired by single-celled organisms, such as: amoebas, evoke cilia and protists. One of Yi’s goals was to make machines look more organic and  \u201cearthy\u201d instead of cold and industrial. To do so, she replicated the pattern of a mushroom lattice for one of the creature\u2019s tentacle, based on the lacy \u201cskirt\u201d of the veiled lady mushroom that has been in her work since 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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