Xiaoze Xie

Xiaoze Xie was born in China the same year as the Cultural Revolution and as a young man he was a witness to the Tiananmen revolt. Since 1992 he has lived in the United States, working as an artist and professor of art with frequent trips back to his native country. These experiences have given him a unique perspective from which to observe the role of books and newspapers in the cultural life of China and the West and the ways that media preserve and distort our understanding of the world.

Xie explores these ideas in paintings with a realism so intense that it shades into abstraction. He has produced haunting representations of the battered spines of long neglected library books, of dusty stacks of old newspapers, and of fragments of front pages that offer glimpses of long forgotten events and personages. Bringing his concerns up to date, he has also made paintings that capture otherwise ephemeral scenes that flicker across the screen of the Chinese blogging website Weibo. Such works remind us that books, newspapers, and more recently, the internet are all subject to the vagaries of time, neglect and deliberate destruction and manipulation. One body of work involves the discovery and recovery of a cache of ancient Chinese manuscripts dating from the 4th to the early 11th centuries. Another emerges from a deep study of the history of banned and forbidden books in China over the last 2000 years.

Xie’s concerns are as current as today’s headlines, touching on censorship, media manipulation and the control of facts and data. But in presenting his ideas, whether in the form of paintings, photographs or videos, Xie deliberately slows down the relentless pace of contemporary information. He celebrates the physical objects that contain our history and culture and asks us to pause and consider their vital place in a constantly changing world. His is a slow art in a fast world, putting beauty in the service of memory and history.

Today, Xiaoze Xie is an internationally recognized artist and the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. Xie received his Master of Fine Art degrees from the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing and the University of North Texas. He has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally; his recent solo exhibitions include “Objects of Evidence” at the Asia Society Museum in New York City (2019-20) and “Eyes On” at the Denver Art Museum (2017-18). Xie’s work has garnered critical acclaim, his exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Artnews, and hyperallergic.com, among others. His work is in the permanent collection of such institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Denver Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, San Jose Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum of California. He is a recipient of the 2022 Asia Game Changer West Award from the Asia Society Northern California. Xie received the Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2013), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003), and artist awards from the Dallas Museum of Art and Phoenix Art Museum. Xie has published several exhibition catalogs as the subject and as a contributor. In 2016, a monograph of Xie’s work titled Xie Xiaoze: Artist Iconography was published by Xuelin Press in Shanghai.