“Anicka Yi: Karmic Debt” Opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in June, the Latest in the Museum’s Long-Running Summer Immersive Series

“My mission as an artist is to create possibilities of other worlds, and other ways of living and being, even if just for a moment.” —Anicka Yi 

HOUSTON—May 21, 2025—From animatronic sculptures that breathe and flicker like prehistoric lifeforms to generative software designed to carry on her practice after death, Anicka Yi approaches technology not as an instrument of control, but as a creative partner. Her concept of the “biologized machine” conjures hybrid beings that blur the boundaries between the organic and the synthetic—entities that feel both futuristic and deeply ancient. Drawing on deep-sea microbes, algorithmic avatars, and spiritual systems of thought, Yi reveals the invisible forces—biological, technological, and metaphysical—that shape our shared and uncertain futures.  

Anicka Yi: Karmic Debt brings to Houston two complementary installations: a suite of five of her Radiolaria sculptures and the immersive video Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light Of the Moon. Both installations dissolve boundaries between biology and technology, proposing new ways of thinking about perception, sentience, and survival across human and nonhuman realms, asking us to reimagine how life—and art—might evolve, mutate, and persist. The exhibition will be on view at the MFAH June 29 through September 7, 2025, in the museum’s Cullinan Hall.

“Anicka Yi shows us that it is possible to use AI systems to express our most human concerns, as she invites viewers to consider our place in ever-evolving cycles of creation and change,” noted Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH. “We are enormously pleased to present these two captivating installations, and to welcome Yi’s extraordinary work into the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with our recent acquisition of Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light Of the Moon.”  

Yi frames these two installations through the multifaceted lens of Karmic Debt: as a meditation on invisible systems of accountability that span Buddhist cycles of cause and effect, ecological and political retribution, interspecies ethics, inherited trauma, and the moral pressures of living in a world shaped by financial and environmental imbalance. In this context, “debt” is not only economic—it is also emotional, spiritual, and relational, connected to the air we breathe, the histories we inherit, and the responsibilities we carry toward others, both human and more-than-human. What do we owe to each other—across species, generations, and lifetimes? What traces do we leave behind? And how might art help us sense, and perhaps redress, the invisible imbalances we inherit and create? 

Radiolaria 
Anicka Yi’s Radiolaria resemble giant living cells—suspended forms that seem to drift through the gallery, gently undulating as if pulled from the ocean’s depths. Light flickers across their fiber-optic surfaces, revealing a delicate interplay between handwoven structure and mechanical precision. These animatronic sculptures embody Yi’s concept of the “biologized machine”—a hybrid lifeform where artificial intelligence and organic matter begin to speak the same language. 

The inspiration for the series comes from radiolaria, single-celled marine organisms that first appeared over 500 million years ago. Known for their intricate silica skeletons, these ancient protists play a vital role in the Earth’s oxygen and carbon cycles. Their fossil record offers insight into prehistoric climates—what poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls the “preconditions for our breathing.” 

Each sculpture in Yi’s series mimics a distinct species through programmed behavior: one coils its tendrils in rhythmic spirals, while another expands and contracts like a pair of breathing lungs. Their gentle pulses of light and motion evoke the rhythms of heartbeat and breath, blurring the boundary between biology and technology. Viewers may find their own breathing unconsciously aligning with the sculptures’, creating a moment of quiet communion between human and machine. 

Through Radiolaria, Yi invites us to contemplate deep time, interdependence, and the porous boundary between life and its simulacra. These luminous beings are not only speculative creatures of the future—they are reminders that even the air we breathe is shaped by ancient, invisible systems still unfolding around us. 

Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light Of the Moon 
In recent years, Anicka Yi has turned her attention to how an artistic practice might persist beyond the boundaries of a single lifetime. The death of her sister in 2017 prompted a deeper engagement with questions of mortality, memory, and the potential for technology to sustain a creative legacy. “I don’t really want to stop making art after my biological body ceases to function,” Yi has said—a sentiment that animates her evolving relationship with machine intelligence as a mode of continuity rather than replacement. 

This line of inquiry led to the development of Emptiness, a software project created in collaboration with her studio and a team of engineers. Drawing from Buddhist philosophy, Emptiness is both an algorithm and a conceptual framework designed to extend Yi’s practice through generative means. Trained on over a decade of her artworks, writings, and working processes, the software functions as more than an archive—it is an active, evolving system capable of producing new work in her absence. 

Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light Of the Moon (2024) is the first artwork created with this system. A 16-minute video, it acts as a kind of virtual retrospective, reanimating motifs from Yi’s earlier works—such as aquariums filled with contact lenses or kelp-based sculptures—into digital avatars. These entities inhabit a simulated ecosystem governed by eleven emotional and behavioral traits, interacting, mutating, and evolving over time. Yi likens this shifting structure to quantum superposition, in which multiple outcomes coexist until one takes form. 

Set against a soundscape of gongs and chimes, the piece invites viewers into an immersive, contemplative environment where past materials and ideas are recast into new, unpredictable forms. Here, Emptiness does not simply function as a tool—it acts as a co-creator, continuing Yi’s studio practice as a dynamic, responsive system. “Will I or my studio be haunting the world in the future?” she asks. “We will be creating our own.” 

About the Artist
Anicka Yi (born 1971, Seoul; lives and works in New York City) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Metaspore (Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2022); Hyundai Commission: Anicka Yi: In Love With the World (Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2021); Life Is Cheap (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2017); Jungle Stripe (Fridericianum, Kassel, 2016); 7,070,430K of Digital Spit (Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, 2015); and You Can Call Me F (The Kitchen, New York, 2015).

Group exhibition highlights include New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019), the 58th Venice Biennale May You Live In Interesting Times (Venice, 2019), The Body Electric (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2019), The Dream of Forms (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2017), 2017 Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), The Eighth Climate (What does art do?) (11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, 2016), and Meanwhile ... Suddenly and Then (12th Lyon Biennale, Lyon, 2013). 

Yi is the recipient of the Guggenheim Hugo Boss Prize (2016) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2011). Her works are included in several public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Julia Stoscheck Collection, Düsseldorf; the Rubell Family Collection; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Organization and Funding 
The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Generous support is provided by:
Beth Robertson
Winnie Scheuer & Kevin Bonebrake

About the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 
Spanning 14 acres in the heart of Houston’s Museum District, the main campus comprises the Audrey Jones Beck Building, the Caroline Wiess Law Building, the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden and the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. Nearby, two house museums—Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, and Rienzi—present collections of American and European decorative arts. The MFAH is also home to the Glassell School of Art, with its Core Residency Program and Junior and Studio schools; and the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), a leading research institute for 20th-century Latin American and Latino art. www.mfah.org

Media Contact
Melanie Fahey, Senior Publicist 
mfahey@mfah.org  | 713.398.1136