Anicka Yi
Anicka Yi works at the intersection of art and scent, treating fragrance not as a commercial product but as a medium for conceptual inquiry. The Korean-American artist, who received the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2017, built her reputation through immersive installations that explore smell as a vehicle for memory, identity, and cultural experience. Yi lacks formal perfumery training, yet she developed an acute olfactory sensitivity through relentless personal exploration and close collaboration with master perfumers. Her work with Barnabé Fillion, her longtime creative partner, culminated in Biography, a collection of three fragrance volumes that imagine scent as biography itself, each capturing the essence of radical historical and hypothetical female figures. Yi approaches fragrance like an artist working with any other medium: questioning assumptions, subverting conventions, and using scent to tell stories that language cannot.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Anicka composes
Yi's approach favors unexpected ingredient combinations that carry intellectual weight alongside sensory appeal. Her work with Barnabé Fillion draws on yuzu, patchouli, and materials evoking ancient Egypt, reflecting her interest in historical and hypothetical subjects. The presentation itself becomes part of the work, with fragrances suspended in clear acrylic vessels that echo museum display conventions. Her style resists easy categorization, blending fine fragrance materials with conceptual rigor to create scents that function as arguments as much as experiences.
Philosophy
What drives Anicka
Yi treats fragrance as conceptual art, asking what a scent can reveal about identity and history that words cannot. She rejects the traditional perfumer path, believing that formal training can constrain intuition. Her creative process begins with research and narrative, building fragrance concepts around specific personas and imagined histories before translating them into aromatic form. For Yi, the body becomes a site for storytelling, and perfume serves as a living document of who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be.
The houses