Portrait of Anicka Yi, Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Photography by Lorenzo Palmieri
Anicka Yi
Anicka Yi (b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in New York City. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Leeum, Seoul, South Korea (2024); Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (2023); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2022); the Hyundai Commission, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2021); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Fridericianum, Kassel (2016); Kunsthalle Basel, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (MASS.), and The Kitchen, New York (2015); the Cleveland Museum of Art (2014). Yi has also participated in significant group shows, including the Venice Biennale (2019); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017); the Okayama Art Summit, the Gwangju Biennale (2016); the Taipei Biennial (2014); the Lyon Biennale (2013). Important prizes won by Yi include The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2011) and the Guggenheim Hugo Boss Prize (2016).
Featured centrally in the Robert Day Sciences Center Quantum Library bookshelf niche is a compelling artwork by acclaimed contemporary artist Anicka Yi (b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea).
H£Rñ§ñ0H§L (2025) is part of Anicka Yi’s ÄLñ§ñ series and marks a new phase within the body of work: larger in scale, more spatially immersive, and dense with environmental charge.
As with all works in the series, the title for H£Rñ§ñ0H§L was generated through a machine learning model trained on Yi’s prior language, conjoined with texts from poetry, marine biology, and quantum theory. After selecting a phrase, Yi compresses it phonetically and transcribes the result into a custom alphabet. The final title arrives as a transmission from an alien logic—partially legible, partially concealed.
The painting itself radiates with atmospheric intensity. Color fields bleed and diffuse like ink dropped in water or rain soaking into earth. Warm violets, bruised mauves, and mineral reds seep across a cooler-toned, high-gloss surface, conjuring organic decay and refracted light. Some passages hint at botanical structures—a seed pod in rupture, a pulp-like cross-section, fermenting fruit—yet there is no fixed anatomy, only porous thresholds and emergent forms.
The artwork is available for viewing during normal building operating hours.