Xiaoze Xie
Lost Tales and Recovered Histories
Pi Artworks London
14 March - 17 April 2024
Lost Tales and Recovered Histories at Pi Artworks London brings together two bodies of work: recent paintings from The Library Series and a new sculpture series titled Amber of History by Chinese American artist XIAOZE XIE. Through installation, sculpture, and painting, Xiaoze Xie explores the interrelatedness of books, libraries, and historical events, interrogating the vulnerability and deterioration of history and memory.
The Library Series is Xie’s largest body of work. Begun in 1993 when he was studying painting at The University of North Texas, the series has evolved as Xioze Xie has developed as an artist and teacher. When visiting libraries in the U.S. and around the world for research, Xiaoze Xie would photograph the arrangements of books left on the shelves by librarians, his one rule being that he could never reposition them in his paintings. It is the newest works from the series that are on display here: featuring books from the Guimet Museum in Paris, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C, and the Hubei Provincial Library in Wuhan, China, Xiaoze Xie uses a rich palette to give hints of the books’ content and emotional resonance, and to evoke the space and atmosphere of the institutions that house them. In Xie’s paintings, books, like the ideas within them, are subject to neglect and deterioration. Yet their preservation and continued existence, in however reduced forms, is a testament to their importance and the people who love, and care for them.
These themes of loss and absence are also present in Xie’s sculptural works, inspired by the discovery of Mogao Cave 17 at Dunhuang, China. Built during the late Tang Dynasty (851-862 A.D.), Cave 17 (also known as the Library Cave) was once the memorial hall of Dunhuang’s chief monk Hong Bian, and contained around 50,000 items including Buddhist sutras, literature, cultural relics, and artworks, before it was sealed. In 1900, the cave was rediscovered, and the majority of artefacts—nearly 40,000 documents, scriptures, and other cultural relics—were successively purchased by European expeditioners.
For Xioze Xie, the Library Cave and Dunhuang have been an important artistic influence for nearly a decade, and his series of resin sculptures, Amber of History, which includes Rain of Languages (2023) and Splendor of Colors (2023), takes the architectural form and physical dimension of the Library Cave as their starting point.The artist centres his imaginative explorations on the dialectical concepts of “plenitude/emptiness”or “gathering/absence”to make works here that figuratively restore the Library Cave’s voluminous holdings. In doing so, he analyses civilizational connections, notions of material abundance, and concretizes the idea of “a rain of language”
Ultimately, Xiaoze Xie’s project deals with the Library Cave’s complex and troubling history of dislocation and loss, as well as preservation and transformation of culture. His wider practice resonates with the ongoing discussions on ethical issues surrounding the acquisition of relics of other countries by Western institutions, and the controversy surrounding repatriation, and discarding of cultural artefacts.
XIOZE XIE (b. 1966, Guangdong Province, China)
Xie is an internationally recognized artist and the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. He received his MA in Fine art from the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing and the University of North Texas, and has a BA in Engineering in Architecture from Tsinghua University. m, San Jose Museum of Art and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Xioze Xie received the 2022 Asia Game Changer West Award from the Asia Society Northern California, the Academic Award in Painting in The Third Nanjing International Art Festival (2016), 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.
Permanent collections include: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Oakland Museum of California, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
PI ARTWORKS LONDON
55 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EG
