Anicka Yi wins 2016 Hugo Boss Prize

On October 20, Korean-born, New York-based artist Anicka Yi was announced the winner of the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize. Yi is known for her conceptual installations that incorporate and explore elements of scent, tactility and perishability. The 45-year-old artist is the 11th recepient of the Hugo Boss prize, which is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and is now in its 20th year. As winner of the prize, Yi will receive USD 100,000, as well as a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which will open in April 2017.

The biennial Hugo Boss prize was established in 1996 to “recognize significant achievement in contemporary art,” with Yi being the 11th artist to receive the award. An international roster of artists make up the past winners, which include Matthew Barney (1996), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), Emily Jacir (2008), Danh Vo (2012) and Paul Chan (2014), among others.

Yi was selected from a shortlist of six finalists, which also included Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera, British video artist Mark Leckey, American conceptualist Ralph Lemon, Los Angeles-based painter Laura Owens, and Egyptian artist Wael Shawky. Elaborating on their selection of Yi as the 2016 prize winner, the jury panel stated: “We [were] particularly compelled by the way Yi’s sculptures and installations make public and strange, and thus newly addressable, our deeply subjective corporeal realities. We also admire the unique embrace of discomfort in her experiments with technology, science, and the plant and animal worlds, all of which push at the limits of perceptual experience in the ‘visual’ arts. The artist gives material and olfactory form to complex networks of ideas, imbuing her unusual materials with both political and psychological urgency.”

Most recently, Yi’s work was featured in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2016); Kunsthalle Basel (2015); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2015); The Kitchen, New York (2015); and Cleveland Museum of Art (2014). She has also exhibited in major international group exhibitions such as at the Gwangju Biennial (2016); Serralves Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal (2015); THEM, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2015); Taipei Biennial (2014); and Lyon Biennial (2014).

Hanae Ko is reviews editor at ArtAsiaPacific. 

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