Anicka Yi Envisions Symbiosis Between the Human and Non-Human in Her Show at Seoul’s Leeum Museum
Anicka Yi has emerged in the last decade as a visionary artist who reimagines coexistence, proposing alternative models for a more sustainable future. Her work, deeply grounded in a continuous exchange and interaction with science, illuminates and collaborates with natural processes at microscopic scales. Yi deftly merges science, technology, biology and sensory experiences to explore ecosystems, microorganisms, synthetic biology and the connections between humans and non-human entities.
In her latest show at Seoul’s Leeum Museum, she transforms the space into a boundless laboratory, where natural processes and technological elements coalesce in a continual flow of metamorphosis, creation, destruction and regeneration. Ephemeral organisms like bacteria, fungi and algae serve as her mediums, shaping installations that act as self-contained ecosystems. Through these, she reveals both the disruptive impacts of human intervention and the resilience inherent in these natural cycles. Yi’s work continuously blurs the boundaries between the organic and the artificial, nature and technology, suggesting new forms of integration and celebrating an essential and primordial hybridity.
Discussing the show with Observer, Yi explained: “Hybridity is one way of thinking about our constitution as human: So, you know, we’re co-constituted. There’s no singularity or purity of what constitutes the human. We’re made of lots of different microorganisms and species as we classify them, which complicates this notion of what a species is if we’re nested inside of lots of other species.” She went on to discuss how technological advances further deepen this complexity. “We’re really like merging with technology. We like to think that humans are autonomous and discreet entities, but we are not fully autonomous for those other organisms, as well as with technology now. This is very exciting to me because there are so many possibilities in terms of what we can become and how we’re continuing to evolve.”
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This vision of nature and technology entwined is encapsulated by one of the exhibition’s standout works: something akin to robotic jellyfish. Suspended in the darkened gallery, these creatures, seemingly plucked from the ocean, float in the darkened gallery and pulse with an otherworldly light, their hypnotic movements both captivating and faintly dystopian in their articulations, as an intelligent surface vibrating with the interactions and sensations conveyed by forms. Each part undulates in sync with a breathing rhythm, evoking the interchange of air and resources between their inner and outer worlds, evocative of a heartbeat. Inspired by radiolaria, ancient single-celled organisms with intricate, glass-like shells dating back 500 million years, these animatronic beings underscore Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ idea of “preconditions for our breathing.” Radiolaria’s survival, through delicate balances of Earth’s oxygen and carbon cycles, initiated exchanges that continue to shape our own interactions with the environment today.
Yi’s concept of a “biologized machine” was strikingly embodied in her cocoon-like kelp pod sculptures, showcased at the 2019 Venice Biennale installation, Biologizing the Machine (Tentacular Trouble). These suspended, yellow-lit lanterns, crafted from kelp—a type of algae that forms underwater forests—encapsulate the ocean’s turbulent history within their organic frames. Inside each pod, shadows of insects flicker and indeterminate buzzing sounds create the illusion of a living and breathing machine. By reanimating the organic materials, Yi blurs the line between natural and mechanical, subtly challenging the dominant distrust of technology as an inherent threat to the environment. In our discussion, Yi clarified that her work neither advocates for a techno-utopia nor a techno-dystopia but instead probes potential futures: “We must be cautious and interrogate everything around us, even science. Science is one of our best hypotheses, but we also understand how certain theories are no longer valid and true as we evolve.” Her practice is an ongoing exploration of possibilities, questioning and experimenting with materials to see how those might evolve. “What I do in the studio is fundamentally a research studio,” she said. “We research all these different subjects and experiment with different materials and ideas. Essentially, we practice philosophy through these new materials.”
Yi’s Bacteria Lightboxes, also featured in the exhibition, exemplify her unique capacity to blend organic elements into intriguing compositions, synthesizing human creativity and constructed organic environments. These richly hued patterns emerge as algae naturally contaminate or form symbiotic bonds within acrylic frames—a juxtaposition that recalls both traditional Japanese shoji screens and modern design structures like computer networks and city grids. In these works, distinctions between human and nature, natural and unnatural, are questioned and ultimately dissolved, suggesting a new aesthetic integration where boundaries are rendered fluid.
Yi’s exploration of the integration of human techne, nature and advanced technology reaches new depth in The Quantum Foam Painting, an A.I.-generated work in which an algorithm trained on images from her earlier pieces produces compositions that echo her own visual language in a kind of “self-cannibalization.” In this recycling of her own visual language and biotech glossary, Yi reintroduces natural elements—algae, bacteria and organic tissues—that transform into mysterious terrestrial or cosmic landscapes that activate mythic and symbolic connections originating from this continuous interplay between human intelligence, natural structures and the machine.
Yi further develops this “biological imagination” in her video piece The Flavor Genome, a 3D work set in the Brazilian Amazon. Blending scientific inquiry, philosophy and sci-fi, the work to question the possibility of a more diverse and sustainable biological model that could challenge traditional, often colonial or exploitative, ideas of the genome. Yi’s narratives, she maintained, are neither fact nor fiction—they’re hypotheses that blend both. MIT professor Caroline Jones describes Yi’s work as “Bio fiction,” staging scenarios where scientific data exist without defined context. “It’s about storytelling around scientific data, to envision new possibilities,” Yi explained, turning speculative fiction into a platform for envisioning new futures.
In other instances, Yi pulls viewers back to a deeper tangible reality—the physical but ultimately transient nature of human interaction with the world. Embracing and testing unconventional materials, her Kombucha sculptures, such as Feeling is a Skill, are made from symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). Through fermentation, their surfaces morph into vellum-like forms, exploring yet another way to “build” through a symbiotic process.
Yi believes this symbiosis and collaboration with nature should feel inherently organic, as humans are innately part of a web of interconnections and interdependencies. “We never left nature as human beings,” she said. “All this is very natural because it’s already in our bodies and all around us. Microbial entities are already influencing our mental health and our digestive health. That’s our genetic history, our lineage, our ancestral history. To bring that into focus is the most natural thing for me.”
This is not the only work in the show where Yi employs materials linked to Asian cuisine: in another piece, even more unsettling, she arranges tempura flowers into panel compositions that evoke a vanitas—a symbol of the inevitable decay of all organic materials, which are part of an endless cycle of evolution, metamorphosis and dissolution. Through the use of food, Yi also deepens sensory engagement, reminding viewers that our experience of reality is inherently tied to smelling, eating, digesting and metabolizing, linking us in an interconnected circle with other beings.
Much of Yi’s work encourages alternative perspectives on nature and the phenomena surrounding us. By triggering unfamiliar sensory inputs, she invites viewers to move beyond an anthropocentric view of reality and to adopt a multidimensional one. At the same time, her art challenges the “ocularcentrism” in traditional science that prioritizes visual observation and empirical rationality. “We coexist on these different time scales, geological, with the formation of the earth,” Yi said, adding that, “70 percent of the planet’s geological record happened in the Precambrian era. We think our ancestors are great grandparents, but we’re also deeply related and tied to these other biological early life forms.”
In this way, Yi’s pioneering practices foster an alternative empathy toward other species and natural cycles, reintegrating humans as just one of many species within them. Ultimately, Yi offers a new way to perceive the world—beyond the human-imposed notions of linear time and space, individuality and physicality. “I feel like it’s possible to experience multiple realities,” she told Observer. “There are different dimensions: one where we experience reality through our bodies, which is linear time, and then other dimensions that are more in a quantum field, where you don’t need those notions.”
Anicka Yi’s “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One” is on view at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul through December 29.