ANICKA YI AT THE UCCA

Installation view: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One, Anicka Yi, 2025

The director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in China, Philip Tinari, is the 2025 Summit partner that curated the theme: Quarter Life Crisis. Art in a World on the Brink.

The UCCA recently opened a show with Anicka Yi, a former speaker of the 2018 Summit. The exhibition There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One will be open until 15 June 2025, and is the Korean-American artist’s first solo exhibition in China and her most expansive to date. Featuring nearly 40 works, the exhibition spans two decades of Anicka's innovative practice, merging biology, technology, and sensory experience. Co-organised with Leeum Museum of Art and co-curated by Peter Eleey and Gina Lee, the show immerses visitors in multisensory environments resembling labs and spacecraft, exploring impermanence, interdependence, and the porous boundaries between human and nonhuman life.

Anicka uses organic materials like bacteria, scent, and kelp to question fixed notions of life, death, and decay. Works such as Mr. Taxi for GG (2012) and the scent-based Walking on Two Paths at Once (2023) evoke ritual, memory, and transformation. Sculptural series like Kelp Pods and Radiolaria blend the organic and mechanical, while Another You (2024) incorporates genetically engineered bacteria to explore hybrid life forms.

Anicka also embraces AI, notably in her Quantum Foam Paintings and the video Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon (2024), created with her own “digital twin” software. The exhibition highlights Anicka’s radical vision of art’s future, where creativity and evolution transcend biological limits.

Find out more about the exhibition here.