Invisible Agents: Olfaction, Microbial Life, and Racialized Sensing in Anicka Yi’s Practice

This paper examines the work of contemporary artist Anicka Yi (Korean-American, b. 1971) through the intersecting lenses of olfactory aesthetics, microbial media, and more-than-human agency. In projects such as Grabbing at Newer Vegetables (2015) and Immigrant Caucus (2017), Yi cultivates bacteria sourced from Asian American women and disperses scent molecules derived from sweat and microbial compounds into gallery spaces. These invisible agents—both bacterial and olfactory—destabilize the ocular-centric norms of exhibition and challenge the sterilized boundaries of the institutional white cube.

Yi’s practice foregrounds the molecular as a site of multispecies entanglement, emphasizing how olfactory media—atomized, invasive, and intimate—reconfigure perception, memory, and identity. Her work interrogates how smell becomes a socially conditioned vector of racialization, gendering, and abjection, even as it resists containment. The bacterial materials she cultivates are autonomous agents of transformation, reproduction, and decay, blurring the boundaries and taxonomies that separate beings. In rendering the invisible both sensible and political, Yi challenges anthropocentric assumptions embedded in the history of art and proposes a different sensorium grounded in permeability, interdependence, and posthuman ecology.

This paper situates Yi’s microbial aesthetics within broader debates on nonhuman agency and the biopolitics of the senses, arguing that her practice offers a radical reimagining of embodiment and presence. By enlisting bacteria and odor as sculptural and conceptual media, Yi invites us to consider how art can operate at the level of molecular exchange, where bodies, environments, and species converge, mutate, and co-constitute one another.