ZADIE XA

Early Years

Born in 1983 in Vancouver, Zadie Xa was raised by a single mother who encouraged her to try new things and to be happy. She was brought up in the Catholic church, the rituals and performance of which she has said led her to wanting to be creative. She has also said that her mother would tell her Korean folktales at bedtime, which is how she became interested in exploring this in her artistic practice. She graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design with a BFA in 2007 then gained her MFA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2014. Xa has said that although she studied painting, she felt “weighed down” by the possibilities of paint on a two-dimensional canvas.

Zadie Xa: Artworks

Combining painting, textiles, sound and performance art, in 2025 Zadie Xa said: “I actually think of myself as an installation artist.” Research is key to Xa’s work and she takes inspiration from a diverse set of global references, encompassing Korean mythology and Western pop culture. Her paintings are fantastical, creating other worlds and often inspired by the deep ocean and deep space, while she uses sounds inspired by Korean shamanic rhythms. Methods of textile production have gradually become an important element of Xa’s practice: Korean bojagi quilting, costumes and clothes are part of her ongoing examination of being a person living in a diaspora, as well as identity politics.

• 2019’s installation Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation is a playful reinterpretation of an ancient Korean myth, including dance performances and multimedia elements. Some of the costumes and masks in the exhibition also featured in Xa’s procession through the Giardini at the 58th Venice Biennale.
• For Somerset House Studios’ experimental sound, music and performance series in 2020, Xa developed and presented a six-part, cross-disciplinary piece: Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers. This online piece then became part of Xa’s solo show at Leeds Art Gallery. The performance uses the idea of animal kinship as a strategy to save an ailing planet, loosely based on the Korean shamanic story of Princess Bari.
• Xa was nominated for the 2025 Turner Prize for Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything, which uses sound, sculpture, painting and textiles to explore connections between the oceanic world, Korean shamanism and generational grief. She collaborated with her husband, the artist Benito Mayor Vallejo, on some of the design and sculptural elements of the piece.

Zadie Za: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Guggenheim Bilbao (2026)
• Esker Foundation, Calgary (2026)
• Powerplant, Toronto (2026)
• Rough hands weave a knife, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Marais (2024)
• Nine Tailed Tall Tales: Trickster, Mongrel, Beast, Space K Seoul (2023)
• House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022)
• Long ago when tigers smoked, The Box, Plymouth (2022)
• Child Of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea/Tramway, Glasgow/Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan (2019)
• Soju Sipping on a Sojourn to Saturn, Galeria Agustina Ferreyra, Mexico City (2018)
• Homeboy 3030: Return the Tiger 2 the Mountain, Union Pacific, London (2018)
• The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell, Pump House Gallery, London, (2017)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2025)
• Turner Prize 2025, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford (2025)
• Make a Wish, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2024)
• Eccentric: Aesthetics of Freedom, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2024)
• Beautiful Repair: Mending in Art and Fashion, Copenhagen Contemporary (2023)
• Myths of Our Time (with Heemin Chung and Sun Woo), Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul (2023)
• Soy Dreams of Milk, Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2022)
• The Condition of Being Addressable, ICA LA (2022)
• Bodies of Water (in collaboration with Benito Mayor Vallejo), 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020)
• Feedback Loops, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne (2019)
• Living Room in the Tropics, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore(2015)
• Silent Barn, Brooklyn (2015)
• Frosted and Defrosted, Albion 44, London (2014)

Further Reading

• Zadie Xa’s Instagram
• Zadie Xa’s official website
• Financial Times interview from 2023
• 2024 interview in Harper’s Bazaar
• Artist profile at Thaddeus Ropac
• 2020 conversation from Ocula

Zadie Xa FAQs

Ocula