Installation view of " Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art，2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
We’re at this critical razor’s edge, where we can either annihilate ourselves with our fear of technology or try to endure and prosper.
—Anicka Yi
From March 22, 2025, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents “Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” the first solo exhibition by acclaimed Korean-American artist Anicka Yi in China. Like a carefully planned “future biological laboratory”, this exhibition invites visitors to step into a heterogeneous world woven by bacteria, AI algorithms, genetic engineering and philosophical thinking.
Featuring nearly 40 works spanning her career, the exhibition includes Mr. Taxi for GG (2012), an early work that foregrounds the artist’s enduring interest in sensory experience, impermanence, and the porous boundaries between human and nonhuman entities as well as a new video work, Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon (2024), which is the first work that Yi has created with her Emptiness software. Rather than a linear progression, her early works enter into dialogue with the more recent projects, including these algorithmic explorations and immersive environments.
Anicka Yi at the Press Conference. Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
If it is said that contemporary art is often dominated by the perception with visual hegemony, Anicka Yi intends to subvert this hegemony with the “presence” of smells, touching sense and microorganisms, and she also pushes art further to a battlefield with more primitive sensory. This exhibition explores the multi-sensory world she constructs at the intersection of biology, technology, philosophy and art, showcasing her bold and detailed reflection on human experience in the context of a fluid system.
The moment that a visitor steps into the central gallery of UCCA, he or she might be impressed by the olfactory impact of plastic smell wrapped in disinfectant spray, then got involved in a heterogeneous universe woven by Anicka Yi: here, bacteria sing in the petri dish, mechanical jellyfish float in the artificial nebula, and the burnt aroma of tempura and the cold metal light of the laboratory entangle a surrealistic symphony.
It is designed as a minimalist field like a “laboratory” with a “sterile” atmosphere constituted by white walls and cold light, which forms a sharp contrast with the rotting flowers and squirming bacteria in her work. This visual tension also points out the core proposition of Anicka Yi: in an era highly controlled by technology, how can life break through in the form of chaos, mutation and symbiosis?
Installation view of " Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art，2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Due to the special nature of organic materials, the installation of Mr. Taxi for GG was not actually finished until the day before the exhibition opened. The empty human figure wrapped in a plastic raincoat, with the head replaced by a rotting bouquet, which may be a microcosm of Anicka Yi’s creative context. She refuses to directly present the human body, but through the decay and reorganization of materials, she implies the existence of life, the impermanence of life, and intends to reveal the ghost of the posthuman state. While bacteria continue to erode the bouquets during the exhibition, challenging the eternal “immortality” myth of art, she puts forward: If life eventually disappears, how can art cope with it?
Anicka Yi, Mr. Taxi for GG, 2012, fried flowers, raincoat, hanger, 87 × 55 cm. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York. ©Anicka Yi. Photograph by Kei Okano, courtesy the artist and Misako & Rosen.
Anicka Yi, Early Classical IV , 2014, tempura fried flowers, paraffin wax, resin, plexiglas, stainless steel shelves, chrome plated dumbbells, 121.9 × 81.3 × 15.2 cm. Collection of Eleanor and Bobby Cayre, New York. ©Anicka Yi. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
Following the guide of curator Peter Eleey, visitors entered the narrow silver passage surrounded by the sound of tinnitus and the special smell, which made people feel as if they were far away from the real world. Anicka Yi once described smell as “something rooted in absence” as it reminds people of things that have disappeared, but it also implies an undefined future. Collaborating with renowned perfumer and founder of the Arpa fragrance brand, Barnabé Fillion, Yi crafted a fragrance that blends marine, animalic, metallic, floral, and umami notes, balancing citrus, intensifying algae, and incorporating bold accents like gasoline and petrichor in Walking on Two Paths at Once (2023). This “smell of discomfort” does not please the sensory organ, but it leads visitors into the gap between memory and the future.
Curator Peter Eleey introduced the exhibition to the press. 
The Guided Visit to the Exhibition. Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Beginning with her earliest works, Yi has used scent to immerse viewers in her practice on a visceral level, as smells are often perceived before conscious awareness is formed and they can powerfully evoke people, places and things no longer present. She does not only customize exclusive fragrances for sculptures, but also presents them as independent artworks. She has tried to capture forgotten smells and even imagined what a virtual AI system that archives women’s experiences would smell like.
Growing up as an Asian immigrant in the United States, Anicka Yi is also particularly sensitive to the cultural attributes of scent which became a part of her identity being "the Other". She once said that she lacked a sense of belonging, so she hoped to present a sense of solidity and stability in her works, reflecting a sense of isolation while creating a symbiotic community.
Installation view of " Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art，2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Corresponding to the title of this exhibition, Another You (2024) extends Yi’s investigation of human/non-human relationships. Realized in collaboration with biologists from the College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, the work employs colorful, genetically engineered bacteria that incorporate the DNA of marine organisms like jellyfish and coral in a hybridization that redefines the lines between species. Together, these works challenge conventional notions of life, kinship, and identity, offering a vision of a future where biology, technology, and humanity are intricately connected through a reshaping of conventional understandings of existence.
Installation view of " Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art，2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Highlighting Yi’s ongoing exploration of organic and non-organic life forms, the mechanical installation Radiolaria series (2023-2024) simulates the breathing of Cambrian creatures with optical fibers. She focuses on the biological and geological history before the Anthropocene, and intends to describe a “non-human chronicle” by reviewing primitive life, questioning whether humans are the end of evolution in Plastiglomerate (2024).
Installation view of " Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art，2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Anicka Yi, Nested Lung, 2023-2024, PMMA optical fiber, LEDs, silicone, acrylic, epoxy, aluminum, stainless steel, steel, brass, motors and microcontrollers, 118.1 × 74.3 × 74.3 cm. ©Anicka Yi. Photography by Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery, and Esther Schipper. 
Anicka Yi, Plastiglomerate, 2024, high density foam, distressed chrome finish, 114.3 × 119.4 × 9.5 cm. ©Anicka Yi. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York.
Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon (2024) is the first work that Yi has created with her Emptiness software. Projected along the curved wall that marks the edge of the main exhibition space, the video delves into the potential for the creative process to continue beyond the artist’s biological death, offering a provocative meditation on the future of creativity and human expression. At the heart of the project lies an algorithm that is learning from Yi’s studio output, functioning as a “digital twin” of her practice. The resulting video 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. Through these and other collaborations with experimental technologies, Yi redefines our relationship with the digital realm, questioning traditional notions of art as a solely physical and exclusively human endeavor.
Anicka Yi, Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light Of The Moon (video still), 2024, single channel video, 16’04’’. ©Anicka Yi. Courtesy the artist, Leeum Museum of Art, and Gladstone Gallery. Image courtesy the artist.
Installation view of " Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art，2025.
Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
The final work of this exhibition, Single Table (Sad Café), is like a lonely future language of the Anthropocene. The plastic bag on the chair echoes the plastic raincoat at the very beginning. The human-shaped raincoat has become dangling pearls wrapped by a plastic body bag. The symbol is related to the human body still exists, but humans are nowhere to be found. This may be the ultimate metaphor that Anicka Yi buried: when the boundaries between humans and non-humans, nature and artificiality are collapsing in the trends of science and technology, a true evolution may emerge from the reorganization of biological senses.
Installation view of " Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art，2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Being the first solo exhibition of Anicka Yi in China, “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” does not adopt the traditional way of display in exhibitions, but it is presented to be an experimental field of life wrapped in the future sense. With pungent smells, squirming bacteria and cold algorithms, it prompts the audience to confront the absurd reality that interwoven by technology and life. Wandering between provocation and poetry, Anicka Yi introduces “non-elite” materials such as bacteria and smells into art, which can be regarded as a rebellion against the tradition of white box in art galleries. When viewers are forced to intervene in these works from the perspective of smell, touch and even microorganisms, art ceases to be an object to be gazed at, but it becomes a physical encounter. Here, art provides no answers, but a way of asking: When human beings try to play the role of the Creator, are we ready to accept that we will also become objects to be reshaped?
Text (CN) edited by Du Yitong, (EN) edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO
About the Exhibition
Exhibition Period: 2025.3.22 – 2025.6.15
Location: UCCA Beijing Great Hall
