XIE XIAOZE

Born in rural Guangdong province in 1966, Xie was profoundly influenced by early memories of his father, a school principal, being forced to collect books for destruction during the Cultural Revolution. After moving to the United States in 1993, where he now serves as a professor of art at Stanford University, Xie developed a deep fascination with books. This led him to explore major museums and libraries worldwide, including return visits to China, investigating repositories of past knowledge. For over three decades, his practice has focused on unravelling the complex relationships between knowledge, history and power through paintings, installations, photographs and videos.

The Chinese Library Series—Initiated in 1993, The Library series represents Xie’s most extensive body of work, with The Chinese Library series following in 1995, Using a rich palette, Xie depicts stacks of Chinese thread-bound books and manuscripts, their pages curling and crumbling, marked by barely legible characters. In a photorealist style, he captures the solemnity of books in soft light, invoking the reverence felt when gingerly leafing through ancient, fragile papers, while hinting at the books’ content and emotional resonance.

The exhibition presents several oil paintings alongside ink on paper works from this series. These contrasting media offer distinct interpretations of the same subject: while oil paint achieves an air of hyperrealism, the paper medium conveys fragility and echoes traditional Chinese landscape painting. As Xie notes, “The abstract style of this ink on rice-paper painting initially obscures the subject—Chinese threadbound books. “As in the study of the frayed books, the familiar elements of Western representational painting—light, shadow, volume, space—are supplanted by the vocabulary of dynastic Chinese landscape painting in which rocks, trees, clouds, and water are composed of rugged brush strokes and subtle layers of ink wash.”

Amber of History: Library Cave at Dunhuang—In early 2017, Xie was invited to be the first artist-in-residence for the Dunhuang Foundation in the United States. During his residency, after researching the area’s history, he launched a project centred on Cave 17—the Library Cave. This experience profoundly impacted his artistic development, aligning with his vision of bridging traditional culture with contemporary concepts and integrating academic research into art. He conceptualises the Library Cave as a “historical amber,” “memory stratum,” and “time capsule” that preserves the genetic heritage of Chinese culture, bringing forth the dusty scrolls and poetic history hidden within the cave to our present vision. The exhibition features recent ink paintings and resin sculptures from the series. A concurrent exhibition dedicated to the same series is on view at Pingshan Art Museum in Shenzhen, China.

Xie’s research into library collections led him to explore literary censorship in Chinese history. He has methodically documented banned books from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) through the Republic Era (1911-1949) and early People’s Republic period (1950s), examining how censorship reflects changing political ideologies, religious allegiances, and moral priorities. The research has informed both his paintings and archival installations over the years, including an exhibition at Asia Society New York, Xie Xiaoze: Object of Evidence (2019-2020). This upcoming exhibition includes his life-size, hand-sculpted and hand-painted porcelain reproductions of previously banned books, some of which will be displayed publicly for the first time.