Anicka Yi
- Artist Statement
- Curator Statement
- Website
- Press
Artist Statement
My practice explores the way language, media, and economy mediate technologies of the self and ways in which art making can be pushed towards an expanded notion of the sensorial. I am interested in connections between materials and materialism, states of perishability and their relationship to meaning and value, consumerist digestion and cultural metabolism, stomachs as biological metaphor, scent, the fragrance industry as memory machine and post-humanist theory with it’s sociopolitical implications for the body, the senses. My interest in the sensorial stems from the limits of its portability and transmissibility as a subjective experience and a desire to reorder and reconfigure the spatial and experiential terms of a strictly visual art.
Curator Statement
Arcimboldo. Seeing his work changes your sensual relationship to both portraiture and still life. His paintings were so out of bounds for his time, and even in modernity his style warps the visual landscape. What Arcimboldo did was build a portrait out of fish, vegetables, fruit, and meat . . . deemed subjects of still life long before Dalí and Magritte brought the term surrealism into the modern vernacular. Anicka Yi’s work reflects this idea of a strange paradigm, but one that fills the normality that surrealism is in the 21st century . . . Bringing along with it is both a multifaceted as well as critical view on individualized mass production. A cycle of five Uniqlo sweaters, unique from each other in color, each neck stuffed with tempura battered fried flower bouquets, also differentiated by both flower arrangements and density of tempura. Dripping, the bouquets seep oil from the tempura like sweat onto the bodice/chest area of all the unisex sweaters . . . Mimicking the visual cue of sweat on a Crunch T-shirt after a five-mile jaunt on the treadmill. So, this modern Arcimboldo, Anicka, tests our senses, four out of the five. See the visual portrayal of some type of bot, touch it you might, cause it’s sorta edible . . . Which leads to taste, repugnant or inviting, it’s kinda neither, but smell or the thought of it remains, and that’s kinda what both Anicka and Arcimboldo want.
Selected Press
“Goings On About Town: Art – Anicka Yi,” The New Yorker, October 2011
Katy Diamond Hamer, “Anicka Yi: 47 Canal Street – New York,” Flash Art, November/December 2011
Kriti Upadhyay, “Interview: Anicka Yi,” zingmagazine, June 2012
Victoria Stapley-Brown, “Anicka Yi awarded 2016 Hugo Boss Prize,” The Art Newspaper, October 2011
