On March 4, Pace Gallery announced its representation of Anicka Yi, who is Korean American conceptual artist.
 
Born in Seoul in 1971, Yi immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of two and is widely regarded as a diasporic artist. Grounded in this experience and identity, her work has explored themes such as new forms of life and intelligence, class, gender, and migration.
 
Through inventive installations that combine unconventional and mutable organic and synthetic materials—ranging from microorganisms to technological elements—Yi reconfigures the boundaries between sensation and life. Bridging technology, biology, and the senses, her practice has drawn international attention for its use of organic and ephemeral materials, including bacteria, scent, and flowers, to sensitively probe human emotion and perception.

In 2015, at her solo show at the Kitchen in New York, Yi exhibited bacteria swabbed from one hundred women. In 2016, she won the Hugo Boss Prize and exhibited bacteria sampled from Chinatown and Koreatown in New York, a massive circuit board–like ant colony, and a mixed scent of ants and Asian American women’s sweat at the Guggenheim Museum.
 
At her first museum solo exhibition in Asia, held in 2024 at the Leeum Museum of Art, Anicka Yi presented a comprehensive survey of her practice, which has challenged authorship and anthropocentrism through works engaging various life forms, machines, and nonhuman collaborators.

Samanthe Rubell, President of Pace Gallery, described Yi as “one of the most innovative artists of our time,” adding that “her experimental practice, which grapples with relevant political and ecological questions of the present moment, is part of a long lineage of artists—including Robert Irwin and James Turrell—who expanded the phenomenological possibilities of art making.”
 
As her first collaboration with Pace Gallery, Yi will present new work at Art Basel Hong Kong on March 27. In 2027, she is scheduled to hold her first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York.

References

• 페이스 갤러리 보도자료 (Pace Gallery Press Release)