<There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One> at the Leeum Museum is Anicka Yi’s first museum exhibition in Asia. Through an extensive list of works spanning a decade and a half’s worth of artmaking, the artist continues her ongoing exploration of the Self and Not Self, while questioning and blurring the boundaries between biology and technology. The exhibition culminates in the debut of a new body of work titled Emptiness, tying together the many themes explored throughout her œuvre to contemplate new modes of evolution yet to come.

It would be easy to view such an auspicious occasion as a grand homecoming of sorts for the Korean-born artist, who immigrated with her family to America when she was two years old. And yet prior to the exhibition, Anicka had visited Korea only a handful of times. Like many immigrant children, she grew up distanced from Korean culture, particularly the language.

In such cases, social interactions in the motherland can vary: some will immediately welcome you with warm kinship, while others may see you as not just a foreigner but a strange ‘other’, culturally disconnected and somehow at fault for it. And more often than not, these two sentiments coexist: you are seen as an estranged relative, welcomed but never really accepted into the fold.

To attempt to break through this social hurdle via unabashed social immersion is an intensely uncomfortable ordeal. To do so when a major professional endeavor is on the line no doubt exacerbates this discomfort. And yet this is precisely what the artist did while preparing for her exhibition, during which she resided in Seoul for over a month working closely together with numerous local collaborators in capacities that far surpassed any such discomfort.

During initial interactions with the art handlers in charge of the assembly and installation of the 30-plus featured artworks, they immediately assumed the artist was a 외국인, an aloof foreigner who doesn’t speak the language (despite her ‘Korean’ appearance). Anicka made sure to correct this misconception from the start, mustering up her dormant Korean and establishing that yes, she was also “one of them”, albeit with a somewhat stunted vocabulary.

This proved invaluable once the inevitable troubleshooting began: bio-matter components behaving erratically to Seoul’s humidity, misplaced wiring, logistical setbacks and more all meant that Anicka and company were glued on-site until the very last moment. The local installation team proved heroic in this regard, displaying a level of dedication beyond the merely professional.

Such close-knit local bonds also manifested in the museum dinner held in the Leeum’s lobby. Commemorating the opening of the exhibition alongside that of the adjacent group show <2024 Art Spectrum: Dream Screen> (in which Rirkrit Tiravanija served as artistic director), Leeum invited 120 artists, industry professionals, patrons and friends to a four-course meal.

Three of these courses were concocted by Seoul-based Bar Big Lights, whom Anicka had befriended during her frequent previous visits. Taking inspiration from Anicka’s tempura-fried flowers, Kñ†M£M paintings, and Quarantine Tents series, Big Lights presented new dishes that thematically and visually reinterpreted the works.

Anicka also worked closely with SOL studio, commissioned by Leeum to create a film to archive and accompany the exhibition. For this project the artist and SOL held multiple discussions, first via conference calls, then numerous sight visits and in-person conversations. These dialogues provided insights that were then condensed into a narrative thread contextualizing the key themes of the exhibition, with emphasis placed on the divergence of the biosphere and technosphere.

This mutual narrative-building allowed SOL to flesh out a concrete storyboard and synopsis, while the artist drafted a spoken script to be laid over the film. The result is a film that not only provides a sensory viewing experience of the exhibition, but also functions as an independent narrative and visual statement.

Collaboration has always been an integral part of Anicka Yi’s practice, having worked with microbiologists, engineers, architects and more to create her works. However, the intellectual glint associated with such collaborators, and the triteness of words like interdisciplinary, may belie her underlying, and perhaps most potent, strength: that of a tireless communicator. Adept at expressing thought and cutting through any cultural distances, it comes as no surprise that her collaborations result in something greater than the sum of their parts.

To enter the sprawling, cavern-like exhibition halls, visitors are ushered through a short corridor, heavily curtained off from the museum’s foyer. An immediate reset of the senses ensues - bright daylight is dimmed to barely visible, and the hubbub outside is muffled to a whisper. Just as one’s eyes and ears start to adjust, a pungent aroma makes itself felt. The first work to be encountered, Walking On Two Paths At Once (2023) is a scent co-developed by the artist and perfumer Barnabé Fillion. The artist describes the notes as a translation of “biologized machines, ancient aquatic forms in an alien ocean soup, a bioluminescent tree blooming underwater, and a primordial birthing pool…”. For the less olfactorily imaginative, it feels like a combination of a sharp metallic tang and lightly decomposed plant matter, rounded out by an underlying current of 물비린내, the smell of soupy, stagnant water that you definitely don’t want to drink from.

Audience reactions will vary, but generally veer towards being taken aback to wrinkling their noses. It’s an unusual entrance, and definitely not what’s expected when entering a prim and proper cultural establishment like the Leeum. This intentional discomfort clearly marks a shift for the viewer, into a heightened, slightly alarmed sensory state. What follows is an alien landscape: works that could easily be mistaken for specimens lifted from a secret laboratory populate the dimly lit exhibition hall. The sensation of having stumbled into a cavernous lair is intensified by the irregular whirrs and clicks emanating from the many floating Radiolaria (2024). Ghostly and shimmering bio-mechanical apparitions, they float suspended over seemingly primordial spawning pools. The distant flapping of what sounds like leathery, insectile wings comes from the many kelp pods further ahead, each encasing a erratically fluttering animatronic moth.

Anicka Yi consistently utilises a wide and unorthodox array of materials in her works. Many of them are bio-matter such as yeast and bacteria, unpredictable and fickle in their growths. Another You (2024) is one such work, composed of an ‘infinite’ two-way mirror encircled by a backlit ring populated by agar and bacteria cultures. On the day of its initial installation, it boasted a shining, near-sterile sheen. Not even a week later on the day of the opening, its surface resembled a petri slide left unattended, teeming with virulent growths of bacteria that would make any microbiologist gasp, or blush. An explosion of microscopic ‘life’ on a previously inanimate construct, now inseparable and indistinguishable.

This bio-mechanical landscape slowly seeps in through the senses, and the divide between the biological and technological is blurred. This shift in perception culminates in the semi-hypnotic Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light Of The Moon (2024), the first of a new series of works titled Emptiness. A 16-minute video created in collaboration with NYC-based Laser Days studio, it shows “a series of digital creatures evolving and mutating in a simulated ecosystem”.

Created via a game engine that has been fed with data generated by the Anicka Yi Studio over the past 15 years, the work functions as a algorithmic distillation of the artist’s practice - acting as both collaborator and an independent entity capable of crafting new creations. Emptiness is the convergence of biosphere and technosphere in digital form, in which the artist as a denizen of the former has created through the latter a conjoined, independent twin.

In a 2021 interview, Yi remarked that one of her goals is to appreciate existing “without having any value judgement, without having to produce my own subjectivity or consciousness or anything.” This wish is partly realized in proxy through this new work; she has created a digital version of her Self as an artist that occupies just such a state: existing, being, in a state of emptiness. What new and unexpected evolutionary paths this algorithmic twin will propose remains to be seen.