Walking on Two Paths at Once is not the first work that visitors to the exhibition see, but it is one of the first they experience. Though the scent work is located within the curved hallway that leads to the main exhibition space, its aroma precedes its physical location.

Developed in collaboration with renowned perfumer Barnabé Fillion, the fragrance offers a mix of marine, animalic, and metallic notes, contrasting the harsh scent of gasoline with citrus and algae accents. Imbibing the exhibition with a disembodied presence, it anticipates other pieces imagining alien aquatic worlds, and speaks to Yi’s desire to move beyond Western culture’s visual focus, which is sometimes referred to as “ocularcentrism.” By creating work perceived through senses, like smell and touch, that are sometimes associated with femininity, she encourages audiences to experience art from a fresh perspective.

The Possibility of an Island III explores similar themes by addressing the eye’s fragility and mutability as an organ. Within an irregularly shaped glass bottle, colored contact lenses swim in saline water. Distorted by the curved glass and liquid, the lenses remind us of how easily vision can be altered, undercutting ideas of sight as reliable and empirical. These explorations of scent and sight exemplify Yi’s intervention into what she calls the “biopolitics of the senses”—the manner in which cultural and social forces shape our perception of the world.

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Metabolism—the chemical processes through which living organisms convert matter into energy—lies at the heart of Yi’s practice. By including living or actively decaying materials in her work, she challenges ideas of artistic legacy and encourages viewers to ponder the unseen transformations that sustain everyday life. Le Pain Symbiotique, one of the largest pieces in the exhibition, is conceptualized as a kind of massive artificial stomach. Burnt ochre pizza dough sits inside a plastic tent, accompanied by projected video of bacterial activity. Its contents visible yet ultimately inaccessible, the sealed-off structure offers a reminder of the oft-ignored metabolic processes within our own bodies.

On the other side of the hall, the works from Yi’s “Early Classical” and “Late Classical” series foreground the artist’s use of tempura-fried flowers. As the oily fried flowers decay, they lose potential associations with beauty and romance, underscoring the inevitability of entropy and decay. Asian culinary techniques also feature in the nearby Feeling is a Skill, where a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) from the fermentation of kombucha is repurposed as a leather-like sculptural material.

Image courtesy the artist,47 Canal, New York, andTaipei Fine Arts Museum
Photograph by Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Along the curved wall that encloses the main exhibition space within UCCA’s Great Hall hang seven of Yi’s “Radiolaria” sculptures. These pieces’ sinuous curves and flickering fiber optic lights are inspired by single-celled zooplankton that first emerged roughly 500 million years ago and still exist today. There are thousands of radiolaria species, and each piece represents a different one, whether curling their tentacles or “breathing” by expanding accordion-like segments. These animatronic sculptures exemplify Yi’s notion of the “biologized machine,” which she debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2019 through the presentation of kelp sculptures and pieces incorporating enclosed Winogradsky ecosystems. More recent works related to both series appear elsewhere in this exhibition.

The “biologized machine” concept blends together the mechanical and organic, and imagines communication between artificial intelligences and biological life. The “Radiolaria” sculptures’ sleek forms, reminiscent of insect cocoons and inspired by the sculptures of artist Lee Bontecou, gesture towards the potential emergence of such hybrid entities in the future. But these works also underline humanity’s unexpectedly deep connections with ancient microorganisms: radiolaria form a vital part of earth’s oxygen and carbon cycles, without which a breathable atmosphere would not exist.

Photograph by Andrea Rossetti

In many of her works, Yi explores ideas of kinship—or even direct collaboration—between species and across categories. The three kelp lamp sculptures hanging here transcend their material origins, acting as futuristic “biologized machines.” Light shines out of their gridded-yet-bulbous shapes as mechanical insects flutter inside. The use of kelp, a type of seaweed that forms dense underwater forests, speaks to Yi’s interest in the “Kelp Highway” hypothesis, which suggests that ancient Indigenous people migrated from Asia to the Americas following an ecologically abundant network of kelp forests along the northern Pacific Rim.

This ancient kinship between humans and animals is echoed in Another You, a vitrine hosting bacteria that has been genetically engineered to incorporate DNA from marine organisms like jellyfish and coral. The mirrored vitrine’s illusion of infinite depth sparks reflection on the distant past, while the use of genetically modified organisms touches upon the question of how new technologies may reshape relationships between humans, other organisms, and environments—issues also raised by the hybrid species of The Flavor Genome and the human-machine collaboration showcased in Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon.

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In recent years, Yi has explored artificial intelligence, taking it both as a tool and a subject for her work. The “Quantum Foam Painting” series documents her experiments applying machine learning to the medium of painting. The series title refers to the theoretical physics concept of quantum foam, in which tiny particles and energy fluctuations spontaneously appear and disappear due to Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, allowing “nothingness” to briefly become “something” before vanishing again. Trained on imagery from the artist’s earlier works, algorithms created shapes that bring to mind blood cells, algae, and oceanic landscapes. Yi then layered these elements over each other to form compositions that simultaneously evoke aliens, deep sea creatures, and electronic machinery.

Projected along the curved wall that marks the edge of the main exhibition space, the new video work Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon brings Yi’s interactions with artificial intelligence to a more expansive scale. The piece was made using the artist’s Emptiness software, a “digital twin” of her studio, which has been learning from her archive and studio practices. The result is a video that reimagines Yi’s past artworks as living virtual creatures, referencing Buddhist philosophy and quantum meditation. The piece also speaks to Yi’s desire to continue creating art after her death: trained on her work, the software will be able to continue creating “Anicka Yi” art even without her presence.

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These three works debuted at Yi’s 2015 New York solo exhibition “You Can Call Me F.” For that show, Yi developed a bacteria strain out of DNA samples taken from 100 women from her personal network. In doing so, she critiqued how patriarchal structures perceive femininity as something contaminating or dangerous. Within this thematic framework, the three installations also referenced the discrimination that emerged as a response to the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, critiquing how minority groups are often scapegoated during public health crises. Each piece consists of a rectangular prism enclosed in transparent plastic layered with abstract symbols reminiscent of biohazard signs. Along with a scent combining the aroma of the aforementioned bacteria and air samples obtained at New York’s Gagosian Gallery—an apparently sterile smell intended to represent patriarchal power in the art world—the tents contain objects ranging from mass-produced readymades like a motorcycle helmet, to food items like dried shrimp and black tea.

Transparent materials have featured in Yi’s work almost from the start, and often have prophylactic implications. Her first solo show incorporated a mosquito netting curtain into its exhibition design, an early example of her longstanding interest in the motif of a transparent barrier that leaves the interior of a space or container visible yet inaccessible. Separating the viewer from elements of her work—and, at times, from each other—Yi alludes to how people suffering from diseases are often “othered,” kept isolated from society yet subject to depersonalized medical scrutiny.

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“There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One” concludes with two early installations, placed outside of the main exhibition space. Much like Mr. Taxi for GG, which opens the show, these pieces utilize materials and motifs that reoccur across Yi’s practice, and speak to underlying themes of isolation and absence.

A pair of ice sculptures at first seem to finally depict the human body more directly. Though the original iterations of these pieces were based on the form of human heads, here they are modeled on extinct Neanderthals, raising questions about evolution and humanity’s future in an age of rapid technological change. The use of a defunct human species as model also emphasizes Homo sapiens’ somewhat lonely status as the only remaining member of the genus Homo. One head is preserved within a freezer, visible through a glass door, while the other sits on the floor, slowly melting while releasing a complex, organic aroma created by a lamb heart, deer urine, and cedar. By the time the body is shown, it is already disappearing.

An absent body is suggested in the exhibition’s final—and earliest—work. Vacuum-sealed pearls are draped across a see-through Philippe Starck chair. Together, the sculpture’s title and the seat’s emptiness construct a scene of elegant, isolated melancholy.

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