Anicka Yi is probably going to ask you to burn this catalogue. The idea of my words being set on fire should annoy me or maybe even mildly offend? But they don’t. I am instead intrigued. Yi has offered my words a new faculty, a trail indicated by the characteristic scent (I mean this literally) of their meaning, with an apocalyptic end when all memory is eradicated. She describes this as the ‘smell of forgetting’. If you decide not to burn the catalogue, you can smell the scent once you stick your head into one of the dryer doors inserted into the wall. This experience of Aliens and Alzheimer’s (2015), is founded in, but not limited to the burst of olfactory sensation. Her narrative finds its roots in the genesis of the smell – the beginning of absence of memory: a fetus in the amniotic sac. This narrative vision is accompanied by one of end of life, an Alzheimer’s patient surrounded by the metallic, sterile smells of hospital beds, medication and despair. Whether this life was a long one or not is indeterminate and ultimately irrelevant. When you place your head in the dryer it will be dark and you will smell something. Some Sensates have described the smell to be that of burning paper. However, humans perceive smells on a spectrum of sensitivity while associating them with experiences and ironically memory. A paradox of the smell of forgetting that Yi, I am sure, has very intentionally included. She understands that she cannot fully determine how you smell the scent and I do not wish to dictate it to you. Similarly, when you stand in front of Auras, Orgasms, and Nervous Peaches (2011), the three openings in the tiled wall will leak fragrant olive oils that will simultaneously conjure up memories of a public toilet, a freshly cleaned commercial kitchen and for those of you who have been in one, an interrogation cell.

As a Korean-American artist who grew up in a Korean-American household, her mother cooked Korean food. In that social context, the neighborhood kids labelled her house ‘the stinky home’. Early memories of smell for her, like many immigrants from Asia are associated with embarrassment and rejection. Stigmas around these ‘odours’ reduced as highly sensory cuisines like Korean, Indian, Thai and Chinese – amongst many more – became popular, but societal constructs around ethnic smells did not: ‘certain’ people smell a certain way. Never mind that biological science dictates that each human body is developed primarily on genetics, including a unique olfactive identity called the human bar code which synthesizes with major external factors such as diet and environment to produce the body’s specific odor (For example, if you only eat Kentucky’s Fried Chicken, you are dominantly going to smell like Kentucky’s Fried Chicken irrespective of where you’re from). But the science behind the human body is not something Yi can ignore, it is in fact integral to her process. She uses the human body as a medium to produce art that says what she wants to say and she uses art as a medium to study the human body, its metabolic chemistry and its relationship with other organisms, both human and not. Her affinity to strong, distinctive and extreme smells is her rebellion against cultural generalizations. 

Immigrant Caucus (2017) meditates on some of these apprehensions and assumptions surrounding race, identity and gender. The piece is a triad of works. As you enter the ‘holding pen’, you are sprayed with a fuming scent, from three free-standing canisters (similar to the ones used by pest-control). The fume has been synthesized from sweat samples of Asian-American women and a species of ants from the desert of Southern Utah. The scent is meant to serve as a drug (it is not a real drug), that when ingested or introduced into the body has physiological effects that manipulates your human senses long enough to allow you to view the other two installations that form this piece with a fresh and hybridized perspective. The two installations, that complete the piece feature two opposing biospheres. Lined with tiles that hold agar, the first biosphere (Force Majeur) is growing a living composition of varied bacterial strains, collected from Chinatown and Koreatown neighborhoods. The bacterial composition has also been allowed to bloom across several sculptures (inside the biosphere), creating the impression of an alien invasion. The second biosphere (Lifestyle Wars)[Fig.4] houses an ant-colony that has been sprayed with the same hybridizing-drug that you were, suggesting a temporarily shared psyche between you and the ant. Yi is fond of the ants because of their highly organized matriarchal structures and also for their intricate division of labor, creating a network of pathways. The artist reflects these across numerous mirrors multiplying the network to create imagery similar to a giant data-processing unit where the movement of the ants is the transfer of information. Yi experiments with the notion that all forces natural and technological, as disorderly and anarchic as they may seem are primarily clinically contained. 

You Can Call Me F (2015) transforms a sectioned off area of the gallery into a quarantine tent, limiting access and transparency. The move is meant to mimic the language of forensic sites that aim to exercise control and power with a higher agenda of protecting (of course). Cloaked in darkness, you are drawn to the yellow glow of a shelf, and an overwhelming smell, with notes of cheese and decay. Made from Plexiglas, its surface is scratched, covered with grime and has mold growing on it. The mold is a result of the artist swabbing 100 women in her art network for bacterial samples, smearing it over the Plexiglas and allowing it to grow naturally. The mold is very much alive and will continue to grow through the duration of the exhibition. With this live sculpture, Yi has drawn a comparison between the hysteria, chaos and frenzy that follows a contagious disease outbreak, with the patriarchal fear of feminism and potential of female networks. The artist has cultivated the idea of the female figure as a fictional super-bacteria pathogen to emphasize a call to arms, that aims to contain and neutralize the disease outbreak. 

However, neither of these sculptures carry the pungent odors of the Convox Dialer Double Distance of a Shining Path (2011). For this sculpture, Yi utilizes stereotypes of Asian women to play a modern-day witch, doctor and designer and concoct a potion of recalled powdered milk, antidepressants, palm tree essence, shaved sea lice, ground Teva rubber dust, Korean thermal clay, a cellphone jammer and a steeped Swatch watch brewed with abolished math. Her concoction exorcises notions of misguided idealisms and garbled accounts of a life on the run, propagated by radical organizations like the Shining Path.

Yi’s brews are her contribution to developing a sophisticated language around scents; smells are not just good and bad and you do not need to smell polite to be accepted. It is a thread that pulls at many of the pieces in the exhibition, particularly Prada String Quartet No. 15 3/4 in A Minor, First Movement (2013) and Untitled (2013). In both these pieces Yi suspends commercially relevant materials in a framed glycerin soap bar as a comment on consumer patterns surrounding the goods and commodities produced for personal hygiene and physical preservation of the outer body (and the polite scents that package them). It asks you to analyze how personal care products are synthetically produced and how they get into and onto our bodies. Her material list reads: glycerin soap, sodium silicate, desiccant bead, acrylic paint, acetate, plastic petri dish, Prada moisturizer package, teeth whitener, gum eraser, fish oil capsule, silicone insole, wax, clay, spray paint, aluminum frame. It delivers a gentle (or maybe not so gentle) blow to the degree of self-preservation exercised by human vanity; our willingness to pay fifty dollars for a moisturizer (and justifiably so, because it was produced by Prada. Right?). If you were wondering what a desiccant bead is: it is a name for the small balls of silica gel that come in porous packages marked ‘Do not eat. Throw Away’, that come in, well, everything you buy. They adsorb and hold water vapor to reduce the growth of mold and reduce spoilage.

While smell functions as the central plot of Yi’s work, spoilage and material decay of organic and inorganic materials form a familiar and complementary undertone. Walking into the final room, you come across three human-sized Mylar balloons being filled with air using blowers. These self-contained plastic-pods host Maybe She’s Born With It (2015), ALZ/AZN (2015), and Lapidary Tea Slave (2015). Made from tempura-battered-and-fried cut flower, crystalized in acrylic and dipped in greasy, colored resin, these lumpy towers of decaying organic life symbolize the condition of our ecological systems. As the fried-plant life decays and rots through the course of the exhibition, it will leave behind signs, evidence, and residue of the various phases of its life, which Yi aligns with the remnants of human civilizations: text messages, spaces, food and fluids.

Anicka Yi’s work is a meandering but coherent testing of a highly consistent set of ideas. She integrates perfumery and biology to create scents that are both corporeally familiar and challenging by sensitizing herself to the most animalistic of senses (while the rest of the world is contingent on long-distance digital exchanges). It is easy enough to pick up that she has a natural inclination to respond to power, whether they be issues around gender or race. However, her revolt is a mutually transformative process. It is about activating the person sampling her work which in turn energizes her work. So, she uses science fiction to make her work more approachable. And it works. The notion that all living things have their own stories, contexts, perspectives, and histories irrespective of whether they are even human is successful because to a very large degree her work not only includes living organisms (both human and not) but allows them to thrive. She creates a micro-universe and so you can’t deny its existence and consequentially its validity even if you do question the parameters withing which it functions. Shameplex VII, (2015) which is made of seven low Plexiglas containers with even deposits of thick, colored, ultrasonic gel stuck with dozens of needles is reminiscent of this miniature wondering and renders a breeding ground for alien growth. The work animates Yi’s work, but also establishes the obliviousness of the ‘life’ in the container to the powerful intentions of what lies outside of it. It is why the room is dark: to fuel the concept of the unseen or hostile. It also solidifies her material palate, offering each member a dual citizenship of our world as well as her miniature one.

Writing also serves as one of her primary tools. Each piece of work comes with its own back story, like characters in a fantastical movie. It allows her objects to have movement, context function and identity while including nonhuman perspectives (that maybe allow for more tolerance of human point of views?). Yi outspokenly admits inspiration and influence from canonical science-fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), Chris Marker’s films specially Sans Soleil (1983) and Adrian Piper – all successfully generating and merging written language with their work. Yi’s work remains about perception but there’s a fictional element that drives the narrative she proposes, a virtual reality; an increasingly prevalent trend in contemporary art and culture but instead of just placing you in a world that is strange to you, she allows you to create empathy by actually feeling verities of a different ecosystem.

The exhibition comes full circle, moving seamlessly from works that associate with disorder, flux and contradictions of a highly consumerist and hypochondriac-al society, finding closure in one that sustains and preserves its varied anthropology. This also means that it is time to begin anew. I suggest you use a cigarette lighter – a constant flame – and prepare yourself.

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