Kiki Smith - Free Fall is Kiki Smith’s first solo exhibition held at a public museum in Asia. Kiki Smith occupies a unique space in contemporary American art of the 1980-90s through her deconstructive expression of the body and continues to be active in her practice. “Free Fall,” which is also the title of Smith’s work produced in 1994, points to the eruptive and vital energy as well as the wandering movement inherent in Smith’s work, bringing together the past forty years of her vast media experiments and artistic practice that engaged in weaving transcultural narratives that go beyond mere female-centric narratives. It also symbolizes Smith’s dynamism implicit in her exploration of the fragmented body, but it also conveys her performative posture that 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 ranging from sculptures, prints, photographs, tapestries, and artist’s books.
America in the 1980s, which is when Kiki Smith began her practice in earnest, can be summarized by its focus on human rights, equality, identity, and gender discourse with issues surrounding AIDS and abortion rights. Smith, having lost her father and her sister who died from AIDS during this time, peered into life’s frailty and imperfections. Combined with her interest in anatomy, these contexts create an opportunity for her to bore into the border between the inside and outside of the body. With her non-hierarchical approach in her exploration of the body, Smith became a key figure of abject art, boldly dealing with the segmented and fragmented body as well as bodily fluids like menstrual blood, sweat, tears, semen, urine, and other excreta. From the 2000s on, she has been gradually expanding the radius of her work to include subjects like animals, nature, and the universe, as well as other media, endeavoring to articulate a nonlinear narrative that blurs boundaries.
The artist said that the reason she became interested in the body was not simply to emphasize the feminine in a new way but “because it is the one form that we all share; it’s something that everybody has their own authentic experience with,” and it is this multiplicity of interpretations that became a crucial starting point of this exhibition. The exhibition, thus, proposes three loosely connected themes of Beyond Unknown, Wandering Self, and Free Fall based on elements such as narrative structure, recurring elements, or energy, which can be found consistently throughout her oeuvre, from her early works to her more recent works.
Smith has called her own artistic practice a kind of “walking around in a garden.” This symbolizes the wandering movement of a thought that lingers around various media and concepts as well as their borders. And this movement is fully transferred to the screen today, with reverence for all life that is marginalized, insignificant, or not yet reached. 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.” 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.
