Kiki Smith―Free Fall is Kiki Smith’s first solo exhibition at a public museum in Korea. Occupying a unique space in contemporary American art of the 1980s-90s through her deconstructive expression of the body, Smith continues to be active in her practice. By way of Seoul Museum of Art’s institutional agenda of “production” and exhibition agenda of “poetry,” the show has taken the keyword “free fall” in presenting features of the artist that encompass aspects of a producer in multi-media experimentation, as well as those that have allowed her to vary her formative rhythms according to the undulations of the times. Smith has always opted for a non-linear narrative instead of a clear-cut answer between the binary divisions of life and death, reality and ideals, material and immaterial, and male and female. Her attentiveness to “all creatures great and small” and casting a message of coexistence with a deep, considered breath are indeed values worth paying attention to again today when terms like “excess,” “inundation,” and “surplus” have become all too familiar. “Free Fall,” which is also the title of a work of Smith’s produced in 1994, points to the eruptive and vital energy as well as the wandering movement inherent in her work, bringing together the past forty years of her vast media experiments and artistic practice that engaged in weaving transcultural narratives which go beyond mere female-centric narratives. Immediately reminding us of a downward falling movement, “free fall” symbolizes the dynamism implicit in Smith’s exploration of the fragmented body, but it also conveys the performative posture that has allowed her to expand the boundaries of media and concepts through a kind of wandering akin to the moon’s free-falling orbit around the Earth. Based on these characteristics, the exhibition introduces more than 140 works spanning sculpture, prints, photography, drawings, tapestry, and artist’s books. Having gone through the 1980s？90s up to the present day, repeating to adapt and run counter to the undulations of the times, Smith says, “I am still in free-fall.” Our hope is that this exhibition would offer the audience the opportunity to find a starting point for their own story while following the various movements of Kiki Smith that could be summarized as “free fall.”

Poster design by Studio Hik (Heesun Seo, Jie Elaine Wang)