Anicka Yi’s Scents of Subversion

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The olfactory sense has long played a central role in Anicka Yi’s ground-breaking, smelly sculptural explorations of the limitations of our biology and our possibilities of moving past them. Take the tempura-fried flowers, snail excretions, and glycerin of her 2015 exhibition 7,070,430K of Digital Spit, which aimed to invoke a “smell of forgetting.” Yi imagined nothing short of “an apocalyptic end when all memory is eradicated” by corrupting the sense most strongly tied to it. Twelve years in the making, the the South Korean artist’s new triptych of fragrances entitled Biography is bottled philosophy: A set of odorous contemplations of the past and future of our species as personified by pharaoh Hatshepsut, Japanese communist Fusako Shigenobu, and a fictional AI entity comprised of every female experience ever. Available at Dover Street Market New York and Los Angeles, as well as online, the scents (named Radical Hopelessness, Shigenobu Twilight, and Beyond Skin) contain choose-your-fighter multitudes, one as heady as the next.

What about the women inspiring two of the three Biography scents interested you?
“Because Hatshepsut’s brother was kind of a loser, and an inadequate, pathetic character, her father anointed her as his successor. That’s a pretty radical gesture, even by today’s standards, where the U.S. can’t even seem to elect a woman as president. Of course, Hatshepsut’s constituents couldn’t accept their female king either, so she had to concoct this elaborate disguise and carry out her duties in drag. Fusako Shigenobu’s narrative resonated with me as I was trying to articulate my voice as a young person in California by getting as politically active as possible. Living in exile in Lebanon, the founder of the Japanese Red Army had to improvise much of her life and reinvent herself. The binding agent between these characters is that they really had to transform themselves because societal limitations wouldn’t allow them to flourish. They quite radically existed around these very stale identity markers of what it means to be a woman, political, a leader, a human in a world that is not ready for their narratives.”

Most identity markers so arbitrary, too.
“They are very interchangeable, especially within the online binary of like and dislike. Identity—in and of itself—is problematic. It forces you to perform the mould in order to be validated. As soon as you have different opinions from those you share your identity values with, you are shunned. But your ideas are not who you are. You need to have some distance from them in order to evolve. If we zoom out a bit, the idea of this fragrance series becomes a tentacle to a larger thesis in my art practice that really is asking about what constitutes the self. We live in what I would argue are our last evolutionary stages as homo sapiens. We’re going into hybridized speciation, whether it’s through genetic engineering with other animal forms, or through human-machine hybridization. But even within the human body we have trillions and trillions of microorganisms, so thinking of the individual as a unified container is just completely inaccurate. From a microbiological point of view, the human doesn’t even exist. We are dividual, actually. So these containers of identity are pretty flimsy if you look at the big picture.”

Is this where the AI entity of the third fragrance comes in?
“This character serves as a reminder that we need to be progressive and forward thinking in our consideration of identity. When I say it’s comprised of the experiences of every ‘female,’ I’m not limiting it to humans either. I’m thinking of the 23,000 different sexes that this fungus would have, or the Moray eel that starts off as male and transitions into a female in its lifetime. This fictional AI entity represents the intersection of a multitude of species. Our brains just aren’t evolved enough to accommodate all the diversity that exists in the world. It’s a limitation of biology. This is why we will start to evolve into hybridizing and why this fragrance is so key to the series. We need to start reaching out to other kinds of intelligence.”

Anicka Yi’s Biography collection is available online now.

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