When Artspace first began working with Anicka Yi we knew that the resulting limited-edition would be a very special one indeed. Working across biology and technology, the Korean artist explores unseen ecosystems, translating them into works that make them visible and tangible. Since 2019, Yi’s practice has focused on the exploration of Winogradsky cultures—self-organizing microbial ecosystems.
By sealing soil between acrylic panels, she allows these living systems to unfold over time into layered, painterly fields of color—organic compositions that develop gradually, shaped by their environment and never quite the same from one moment to the next. As Yi describes them, they are “essentially living paintings, extraordinary strata of color that shift constantly with temperature, light, and humidity.”
Anicka Yi - Compost Meridian, 2026 - photography Garrett Carroll
For the new edition Compost Meridian, 2026, that living system is translated into Phaidon, Artspace, and Storm King Art Center’s first ever lenticular print, where the image shifts with your viewpoint, creating a subtle sense of movement and depth.
As Yi says, “we’ve printed a photograph of one of these cultures onto a lenticular surface, which restores movement to a still image. As you shift your position, the image shifts with you. The lenticular preserves the essential quality of the work: that it changes depending on where you stand.” The result feels less like a fixed image and more like something in motion—an image that gently changes as you spend time with it.
Anicka Yi - Compost Meridian, 2026 - photography Garrett Carroll
This edition brings that approach into a format that feels active and responsive, shifting as the viewer moves. Rather than fixing a single moment, the print holds onto a sense of change, resisting the stillness typically associated with reproduction.
Compost Meridian, 2026 is an edition of 35 + 5 APs. It is a lenticular print and measures 24 x 16 inches.
Anicka Yi - Compost Meridian, 2026 - photography Garrett Carroll
The release of Compost Meridian, 2026 coincides with Yi’s major outdoor installation at Storm King Art Center, opening May 2026. Titled Message from the Mud, the project marks her first large-scale work in an outdoor setting, where “observable communities of microorganisms emerge in layers of vibrant color, extending her exploration of transformation and interdependence into the landscape itself.”
Message From The Mud is arranged like an archaeological dig, inviting viewers to engage with concepts of deep geological time and evolutionary history through the lens of 'prehistoric biofiction'. This term refers to an imaginative approach to the early history of the planet, using scientific data as a jumping-off point, to envision what life might have looked like if different evolutionary histories had taken course, and what it could look like in possible futures.
Proceeds from the sale of Compost Meridian, 2026 will support Storm King Art Center’s artistic program and mission to nurture a vibrant bond between art, nature, and people.
Yi's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including: Leeum, Seoul, South Korea (2024); Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (2023); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2022); the Hyundai Commission, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2021); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Fridericianum, Kassel (2016); Kunsthalle Basel, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (MASS.), The Kitchen, New York (2015); and the Cleveland Museum of Art (2014).
Anicka Yi with Compost Meridian, 2026 - photography Nir Arieli
Yi has also participated in significant group shows, including the Venice Biennale (2019); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017); the Okayama Art Summit, the Gwangju Biennale (2016); the Taipei Biennial (2014); the Lyon Biennale (2013).She is represented by Gladstone Gallery, Esther Schipper, and 47 Canal.
Storm King Art Center is a 500-acre outdoor museum located in New York’s Hudson Valley, where visitors experience large-scale sculpture, site-specific commissions, and groundbreaking temporary exhibitions under open sky. Since 1960, Storm King has been dedicated to stewarding the hills, meadows, and forests of its landscape and offering artists the opportunity to create some of their most ambitious works.
We spoke to Anicka Yi about the release of this very special edition and her Storm King show.
Anicka Yi - Compost Meridian, 2026 - photography Garrett Carroll
Tell us about the original work that Compost Meridian, 2026 springs from, and why you chose it for an edition now? The Winogradsky cultures have been central to my practice since the Venice Biennale in 2019, when I first enclosed soil between acrylic panels and let ecosystems of bacteria and algae develop into what are essentially living paintings, extraordinary strata of color that shift constantly with temperature, light, and humidity. For this edition, we've printed a photograph of one of these cultures onto a lenticular surface, which restores movement to a still image. As you shift your position, the image shifts with you. The lenticular preserves the essential quality of the work: that it changes depending on where you stand. And the timing felt right, because the Winogradsky cultures are at the heart of what I'm showing at Storm King this season.
Can you tell us a little about what you have done there? Storm King is where the Winogradsky work fully enters the landscape. Message from the Mud is my first large-scale outdoor project, a kind of ecological amphitheater. The installation resembles an archaeological dig: raw earth mounded around a central pool, with acrylic columns rising from the water like ruins of a soil-emerging world where past, present, and future timescales overlap. I combined soil and water from Storm King's South Ponds with sources of carbon and calcium to create observable communities of microorganisms. Through exposure to sunlight and time, diverse arrays of algae, cyanobacteria, and microbial colonies emerge in layers of vibrant color, visible through the clear surface of the columns, almost like abstract paintings. I think of it as "prehistoric biofiction," using scientific data as a jumping-off point to envision what life might have looked like if different evolutionary paths had been taken, and what it could look like in possible futures. Each microbial community sustains and is sustained by the others around it, and the work makes that interdependence visible. The mud very literally has much to tell us and teach us, and I'm trying to create the conditions for it to speak.
Anicka Yi - Compost Meridian, 2026 - photography Garrett Carroll
How do you create an edition of something that is so multi-dimensional? With the Winogradsky cultures, the essential quality is instability. The originals are alive, they shift, they emit scent, they decay. A traditional print captures one instant and kills all of that. However, the lenticular surface introduces physical contingency back into the image: it behaves almost optically the way the bacterial cultures behave temporally. What changes over weeks in the vitrine, the lenticular gives you in the gesture of shifting your weight from one foot to the other, which helps it resist the flattening that reproduction imposes. In this way the edition becomes its own organism, carrying traces of the larger system but evolving under the different constraints of the printed medium.
Have you ever read a book, seen a film, or had an experience that evoked in you what you try to evoke with your work? Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Series [including: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution] where the boundaries between the known and the alien completely dissolve. Byung-Chul Han's Infocracy, which made me think the most powerful thing an artist can do right now is pose a question that lingers like a koan. But the deepest influence is my Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice. That's what my latest project, Emptiness, is named after: the concept of śūnyatā, which tells us that nothing possesses a fixed, permanent essence. It's exactly what the Winogradsky cultures demonstrate materially: there is no stable state, only continuous transformation.
Anicka Yi with Compost Meridian, 2026 - photography Nir Arieli
What are the directions you're currently exploring that feel new to you? That principle of transformation is really what drives Emptiness, which has become the overarching project for my studio. It grew out of a period of profound personal loss, and from the realization that I didn't want my practice to end with my physical body. As a software, it's an algorithm trained on over a decade of my studio's output, not an archival tool but a fundamental recognition of impermanence.
Emerging causal AI models might begin accessing perceptual worlds we can't. That's what excites me: AI that is not just a distortion of the human but something genuinely transcendent. With the Winogradsky cultures, the bacteria do the painting. With my Aerobe sculptures at Tate Modern, the machines developed their own behaviors. With the Emptiness software, I'm trying to endow sculptures with real intelligence so that they can learn and evolve on their own.
Take a closer look at Compost Meridian, 2026.
Anicka Yi - Compost Meridian, 2026 - photography Garrett Carroll
