The Artist Who Stopped to Smell the Gallery: Anicka Yi on the Underestimated Power of Fragrance

“Smell is hell,” or so says the titular character of Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, about what she believes to be the most oppressive of the senses. By contrast, to artist Anicka Yi, smell is an accessory to story. In her distinctive blend of installation and sculpture, she uses scent to relay complex narratives. Much of Yi’s work is comprised of or abetted by scent: a perfume inspired by Barbara Stanwyck’s villainess in Double Indemnity called Mutual Glaze (2012), installations in which she employs small dryers that diffuse carefully crafted scents (Washing Away of Wrongs, 2014, and The Last Diamond, 2015), or her frequent use of materials that naturally cast off odor: olive oil, moss, black tea, dried shrimp. In her show earlier this year at The Kitchen in New York, “You Can Call Me F,” inside a black room she emitted two scents she created via a diffuser—one was the result of an earlier informal scent reading of Gagosian Gallery, what she perceived as the ascetic, clean non-smell of a major gallery; the other came from a strain of bacteria grown from the swabs of 100 art-world women, creating a funky, curdled cheese–like odor. It was a wordlessly made point, that societal norms might rather have women in this world reek of, well, purity.

“With smell there is so much volume,” Yi said from her hotel room earlier this week, just before giving a talk at Frieze London about her acclaimed Kunsthalle Basel show this summer, “7,070,430K of Digital Spit.” (There, she showed works such as Odor in the Court [2015], a small tile oven in which the show’s catalog roasts slightly above a flame.) To Yi, scent ably “encapsulates a subject matter that I’m thinking about,” whether that be feminism at large or the lives of historical figures.

In 2008, she collaborated with Maggie Peng on her first fragrance, Shigenobu Twilight, inspired by the life of the former leader of the Japanese Red Army, Fusako Shigenobu, who purportedly lived in exile in Lebanon; to follow, the scent features three types of cedar wood—valued in Lebanon—and Japanese notes of yuzu and shiso leaf.

In addition to using scents, Yi recasts many materials common in the beauty industry: hair gel, soap, sodium silicate, paraffin wax. The listed mediums in her work have ranged from plastic foot massagers to Prada moisturizer packaging to fish-oil tablets.

“It’s tangential to the production of the self, the hygienic, cleanliness aspect,” she explains. “We have this over-determined anxiety about being clean and smelling clean, and repressing all the so-called perceived unpleasant smells.”

As far as her personal outlook on beauty, Yi keeps it simple. “I’m not that healthy. I don’t exercise; I probably have some habits I would recommend,” she says, laughing. For the hectic London art fair, the New York–based artist “brought a lot of vitamins. And I’m very diligently drinking apple cider vinegar—it works! It makes me feel like I’m resetting my dials.”

Yi is currently at work on her second fragrance, training her nose to identify even more smells. “I felt I needed the structural background around the science of the perfumery. It’s more like a kind of alchemy,” she says. “It’s grounded in a kind of language: You could say musical language is analog to the way we talk about smell,” or, she continues, a kind of linguistics, with smell taking on its own punctuation and syntax. Smell is music, smell is linguistics . . . in any case, it’s far from hell. In Yi’s hands, it’s much more potent.

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