The Culturing of Anicka Yi

In presenting microbial growth, rotting food, scents of decay, or ant colonies, Anicka Yi proposes the natural, wild, or organic as material and subject matter in her recent work. However, through Yi’s manipulations of her mediums, she forecloses the potential of encountering something essential through her work. In recent years, Yi has carved out a place for herself in the contemporary art landscape with works like Immigrant Caucus, an installation featuring a scent synthesized from bacterial samples from Asian-American women and carpenter ants. Yi’s work often disgusts and scares, either viscerally through unpleasant scents, or by invoking the idea of contamination. Increasingly, Yi turns to culturally inscribed materials to trigger a specific type of fear through her work, one not only of abstract germs, but anxieties surrounding female and Asian bodies. Within the context of Yi’s installations, things presumed to be threatening or disgusting are not only controlled, but neutralized and aestheticized. By examining Yi’s work through critical phenomenology, this paper discusses the ways that Yi detourns and abstracts what is supposedly intrinsic to one’s identity. While Yi’s work illustrates an anti-naturalist, anti-essentialist understanding of subjectivity, it nevertheless plays with real fictions that permeate social life. This paper specifically connects Yi’s use of scent to link her work to a promise (or threat) of edibility to touch upon fears surrounding Asian foods within the United States.