Anicka Yi. Walking on Two Paths at Once.

A work made only of scent

Walking on Two Paths at Once is a scent work Anicka Yi made in 2023 with the perfumer Barnabé Fillion, founder of the house Arpa. It has no shape to look at. It exists only in the air.

It was not their first collaboration. In 2015, at Kunsthalle Basel, Fillion helped Yi create the scent of forgetting for 7,070,430K of Digital Spit. Eight years later they returned with another smell, this time not tied to a book or a single room, but standing as a work on its own.

For Yi, smell has never been secondary. From early on she used it as a material equal to plastic, bacteria or food. Here she goes further: the smell accompanies no object. It is the work.

Sea, metal, gasoline, rain

According to UCCA, the scent weaves marine, animalic, metallic, floral and umami notes. Citrus is held in balance. Algae is pushed forward. Then come bold accents: gasoline, and petrichor, the smell of earth after rain.

Read as a list, it might sound chaotic. But each note has a reason within Yi's practice. Sea and algae connect to series drawn from marine life, like Kelp Pods and Radiolaria. Metal and gasoline recall the machine world she keeps placing beside the living. Umami and animal notes recall bodies, food, decay.

UCCA calls the result multifaceted and slightly abject, conjuring vast oceanic and otherworldly realms. The word abject matters. Yi does not want a pretty smell. She wants one that makes the person breathing it pause, unsure whether they like it, unsure where they are.

Those are the two paths of the title. One leads back to the familiar: rain, flowers, the street. One leads out to places no one has been: the deep sea, another planet. The nose walks both at once.

Inside an exhibition about evolution

The work was shown in There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One, a major Yi exhibition co-organised by the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. It opened at Leeum in 2024, then at UCCA Beijing from 22 March to 15 June 2025, co-curated by Peter Eleey and Gina Lee.

Nearly forty works from across her career were gathered: the Quantum Foam Paintings, the Radiolaria series, Memory Sleeper Cell, Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon. Among them, Walking on Two Paths at Once is the one that cannot be photographed. It is present in every room it reaches, yet located nowhere.

Smell is one of our oldest senses, older than words or images. By placing a scent that feels both prehistoric sea and alien world inside a show about evolution, Yi reminds visitors that their bodies still carry a very old way of knowing the world.

What stays is the trust. Yi trusts that a smell, with no label and no image, can stand alone in a museum, and that visitors will stop to breathe it even when it is not pleasant. As with the scentscapes in the Turbine Hall, the air once again becomes the place where the work happens.