Heritage
A house, in its own words
The story of Anicka Yi and Maggie Peng begins not in a perfumery but in the New York art world, where Yi arrived without formal training in either art or fragrance. Around 2007, Yi began experimenting with tinctures, developing her own methods for extracting and blending scents outside the conventions of the commercial fragrance industry. Her work was driven by a desire to challenge what she viewed as conservative and unimaginative approaches to perfume. In 2007, she collaborated with architect Maggie Peng on the first iteration of what would become Shigenobu Twilight, a fragrance inspired by Fusako Shigenobu, who led the Japanese Red Army. This initial scent was later refined and released in 2008 as Shigenobu Twilight, marking the only formal fragrance collaboration between the two creators. The project placed them within a lineage of artists treating scent as a legitimate fine art medium, a tradition that includes names like LXIX and other fragrance artists working at the intersection of art and commerce. Their work predates the contemporary wave of artist-perfumers and sits comfortably within conceptual art circles, having been exhibited at institutions including MoMA PS1 and various gallery contexts. Anicka Yi's approach to fragrance is inseparable from her broader artistic philosophy, which treats scent as a medium for exploring identity, memory, and cultural meaning. She has described her practice as one that seeks to capture the smell of specific people and places, turning olfactory impressions into tangible artworks. Her decision to work without formal fragrance training was not a limitation but a deliberate rejection of industry conventions. Yi's philosophy centers on the idea that perfume can carry biographical weight, that a scent can tell the story of a person as effectively as text or image. This conviction led to the creation of the Biography series, of which Shigenobu Twilight serves as the first volume. For Yi, fragrance is not about hedonistic pleasure or product appeal but about conceptual rigor and emotional authenticity. Her collaboration with Maggie Peng, an architect, brought an additional layer of spatial and structural thinking to the work, treating the fragrance like a building with its own internal logic and atmosphere.