Yi Space is pleased to present Interwoven Visions: The Symbiosis of Body, Nature, and Myth, a solo exhibition by Kiki Smith. Opening on 21 March, this marks Smith’s first institutional solo exhibition in China, featuring twenty-two works in various media, including tapestries, sculptures, and works on paper, created over the past two decades. Spanning the entire museum, the exhibition offers a wide-ranging view of Smith’s exploration of cultural narratives and the mysteries surrounding the body, the human condition, and the natural world.

Since the early 1980s, Smith has engaged a multidisciplinary practice that weds craft-intensive processes with an allegorical visual language. Her earliest work introduced unconventional ways of viewing the body, emphasizing its fluids and functions, reproductive capacities and processes of decay. Soon, she became dedicated to an investigation of the feminine body and its politicization, creating life-sized figural sculptures using materials that mimic corporeal textures—wax, latex, and hair. Over the past twenty years, her focus on the human body and its cycles has expanded to centre on the inseparability of humans from the context of nature and our role within various ecosystems. Increasingly, her work has engaged themes from ancient mythology and folklore. Mystical creatures and nudes, ritual objects, cosmic phenomena, expressions of grief and elation, all intermingle. 

At Yi Space, four large-scale Jacquard woven tapestries feature scenes that bring a feminist lens to environmentalist themes, presenting a mythical world with various human and animal encounters. These works draw on the tradition of the medieval French Apocalypse Tapestry as well as the weavings of the hippie movement. To make them, Smith intricately assembles her collages by hand, carefully overseeing their transformation into woven compositions. The weaving process, carried out on the most advanced looms under her close supervision, preserves the richness of texture and depth, resulting in passages of colour that create elusive optical effects. Many of the works feature abstract borders, horizontal bands that suggest the strata of subterranean realms, landscapes, and the heavens. In Underground (2012), a masculine figure is entangled with the roots of a tree, facing down the earth’s core.

 

The large-scale bronze sculpture Winter (2021) evokes the artist’s zodiac sign, the Capricorn. Part mountain goat, part fish, the sea goat rears up ambiguously, in welcome or in alarm. The creature has a beard of plantlike feathers, and its surface is at once squamous and textured like fur; it seems at once pieced together and vital. Elsewhere, the suspended aluminum sculpture Spiral Nebula (Large) (2017) glitters with mesmerizing ambiguity; evoking both astronomical bodies and cellular forms, the work challenges perceptions of scale. Four large wall-mounted sculptures from 2011 and 2019 feature feminine forms that are fragmented into abstraction, seemingly synthesizing with cosmic or arboreal entities. 

Also included will be eight works, in small and large-scale, on Nepalese paper, whose delicate, translucent quality suggests fragile skin, aged foliage, or weathered book pages. Smith’s imagery—rendered in ink and sometimes glitter, crayon, coloured pencil, or gold leaf—features enigmatic girls, deer, designed objects, and accumulations of organic material. These subjects are overlaid in places with constellations or networks of veins. Lastly, four copperplate intaglio prints with collage envision uncanny nocturnal scenes. In each, a tree surrounded by a glowing aura stands before a spectrum of rays, all emerging from ominous black space. 

Offering an expansive view into Smith’s prolific and varied body of work, this exhibition centres on the mythic depth and narrative power Smith brings to her trenchant, sensitive exploration of our world.