Anicka Yi has emerged within the final decade as a visionary artist who reimagines coexistence, proposing different fashions for a extra sustainable future. Her work, deeply grounded in a steady change and interplay with science, illuminates and collaborates with pure processes at microscopic scales. Yi deftly merges science, expertise, biology and sensory experiences to discover ecosystems, microorganisms, artificial biology and the connections between people and non-human entities.
In her newest present at Seoul’s Leeum Museum, she transforms the area right into a boundless laboratory, the place pure processes and technological components coalesce in a continuous circulation of metamorphosis, creation, destruction and regeneration. Ephemeral organisms like micro organism, fungi and algae function her mediums, shaping installations that act as self-contained ecosystems. By way of these, she reveals each the disruptive impacts of human intervention and the resilience inherent in these pure cycles. Yi’s work constantly blurs the boundaries between the natural and the factitious, nature and expertise, suggesting new types of integration and celebrating an important and primordial hybridity.
Discussing the present with Observer, Yi defined: “Hybridity is one mind-set about our structure as human: So, you already know, we’re co-constituted. There’s no singularity or purity of what constitutes the human. We’re product of a number of totally different microorganisms and species as we classify them, which complicates this notion of what a species is that if we’re nested within a number of different species.” She went on to debate how technological advances additional deepen this complexity. “We’re actually like merging with expertise. We wish to suppose that people are autonomous and discreet entities, however we’re not absolutely autonomous for these different organisms, in addition to with expertise now. That is very thrilling to me as a result of there are such a lot of prospects when it comes to what we are able to grow to be and the way we’re persevering with to evolve.”
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This imaginative and prescient of nature and expertise entwined is encapsulated by one of many exhibition’s standout works: one thing akin to robotic jellyfish. Suspended within the darkened gallery, these creatures, seemingly plucked from the ocean, float within the darkened gallery and pulse with an otherworldly mild, their hypnotic actions each fascinating and faintly dystopian of their articulations, as an clever floor vibrating with the interactions and sensations conveyed by types. Every half undulates in sync with a respiratory rhythm, evoking the interchange of air and sources between their inside and outer worlds, evocative of a heartbeat. Impressed by radiolaria, historical single-celled organisms with intricate, glass-like shells relationship again 500 million years, these animatronic beings underscore Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ concept of “preconditions for our respiratory.” Radiolaria’s survival, by means of delicate balances of Earth’s oxygen and carbon cycles, initiated exchanges that proceed to form our personal interactions with the setting in the present day.
Yi’s idea of a “biologized machine” was strikingly embodied in her cocoon-like kelp pod sculptures, showcased on the 2019 Venice Biennale set up, Biologizing the Machine (Tentacular Bother). These suspended, yellow-lit lanterns, crafted from kelp—a sort of algae that types underwater forests—encapsulate the ocean’s turbulent historical past inside their natural frames. Inside every pod, shadows of bugs flicker and indeterminate buzzing sounds create the phantasm of a residing and respiratory machine. By reanimating the natural supplies, Yi blurs the road between pure and mechanical, subtly difficult the dominant mistrust of expertise as an inherent risk to the setting. In our dialogue, Yi clarified that her work neither advocates for a techno-utopia nor a techno-dystopia however as a substitute probes potential futures: “We should be cautious and interrogate every part round us, even science. Science is one in all our greatest hypotheses, however we additionally perceive how sure theories are not legitimate and true as we evolve.” Her follow is an ongoing exploration of prospects, questioning and experimenting with supplies to see how these would possibly evolve. “What I do within the studio is essentially a analysis studio,” she mentioned. “We analysis all these totally different topics and experiment with totally different supplies and concepts. Basically, we follow philosophy by means of these new supplies.”
Yi’s Micro organism Lightboxes, additionally featured within the exhibition, exemplify her distinctive capability to mix natural components into intriguing compositions, synthesizing human creativity and constructed natural environments. These richly hued patterns emerge as algae naturally contaminate or kind symbiotic bonds inside acrylic frames—a juxtaposition that recollects each conventional Japanese shoji screens and fashionable design constructions like pc networks and metropolis grids. In these works, distinctions between human and nature, pure and unnatural, are questioned and finally dissolved, suggesting a brand new aesthetic integration the place boundaries are rendered fluid.
Yi’s exploration of the mixing of human techne, nature and superior expertise reaches new depth in The Quantum Foam Portray, an A.I.-generated work by which an algorithm skilled on photographs from her earlier items produces compositions that echo her personal visible language in a sort of “self-cannibalization.” On this recycling of her personal visible language and biotech glossary, Yi reintroduces pure components—algae, micro organism and natural tissues—that remodel into mysterious terrestrial or cosmic landscapes that activate mythic and symbolic connections originating from this steady interaction between human intelligence, pure constructions and the machine.
Yi additional develops this “organic creativeness” in her video piece The Taste Genome, a 3D work set within the Brazilian Amazon. Mixing scientific inquiry, philosophy and sci-fi, the work to query the opportunity of a extra numerous and sustainable organic mannequin that might problem conventional, usually colonial or exploitative, concepts of the genome. Yi’s narratives, she maintained, are neither reality nor fiction—they’re hypotheses that mix each. MIT professor Caroline Jones describes Yi’s work as “Bio fiction,” staging situations the place scientific information exist with out outlined context. “It’s about storytelling round scientific information, to check new prospects,” Yi defined, turning speculative fiction right into a platform for envisioning new futures.
In different cases, Yi pulls viewers again to a deeper tangible actuality—the bodily however finally transient nature of human interplay with the world. Embracing and testing unconventional supplies, her Kombucha sculptures, akin to Feeling is a Talent, are produced from symbiotic cultures of micro organism and yeast (SCOBY). By way of fermentation, their surfaces morph into vellum-like types, exploring yet one more approach to “construct” by means of a symbiotic course of.
Yi believes this symbiosis and collaboration with nature ought to really feel inherently natural, as people are innately a part of an online of interconnections and interdependencies. “We by no means left nature as human beings,” she mentioned. “All that is very pure as a result of it’s already in our our bodies and throughout us. Microbial entities are already influencing our psychological well being and our digestive well being. That’s our genetic historical past, our lineage, our ancestral historical past. To convey that into focus is probably the most pure factor for me.”
This isn’t the one work within the present the place Yi employs supplies linked to Asian delicacies: in one other piece, much more unsettling, she arranges tempura flowers into panel compositions that evoke a vanitas—an emblem of the inevitable decay of all natural supplies, that are a part of an infinite cycle of evolution, metamorphosis and dissolution. By way of using meals, Yi additionally deepens sensory engagement, reminding viewers that our expertise of actuality is inherently tied to smelling, consuming, digesting and metabolizing, linking us in an interconnected circle with different beings.
A lot of Yi’s work encourages different views on nature and the phenomena surrounding us. By triggering unfamiliar sensory inputs, she invitations viewers to maneuver past an anthropocentric view of actuality and to undertake a multidimensional one. On the similar time, her artwork challenges the “ocularcentrism” in conventional science that prioritizes visible remark and empirical rationality. “We coexist on these totally different time scales, geological, with the formation of the earth,” Yi mentioned, including that, “70 p.c of the planet’s geological document occurred within the Precambrian period. We predict our ancestors are nice grandparents, however we’re additionally deeply associated and tied to those different organic youth types.”
On this method, Yi’s pioneering practices foster an alternate empathy towards different species and pure cycles, reintegrating people as simply one in all many species inside them. In the end, Yi provides a brand new approach to understand the world—past the human-imposed notions of linear time and area, individuality and physicality. “I really feel prefer it’s attainable to expertise a number of realities,” she advised Observer. “There are totally different dimensions: one the place we expertise actuality by means of our our bodies, which is linear time, after which different dimensions which can be extra in a quantum subject, the place you don’t want these notions.”
Anicka Yi’s “There Exists One other Evolution, However In This One” is on view on the Leeum Museum of Artwork in Seoul by means of December 29.
