PRESENTATION: Zadie Xa-Rough Hands Weave A Knife

Zadie Xa has developed an expansive practice that addresses the nature of diasporic identities, global histories, familial legacies and interspecies communication. She explores these themes through immersive installations that appeal to the sensory experience of the viewer, often incorporating painting, sculpture, textile, sound and performance elements.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Born in Vancouver, Canada and now based in London, Xa draws upon her Korean heritage as she seeks to elevate narratives that have been erased or repressed by the West and occupying powers. For her, art offers a means to analyse socio-political conditions and cultural behaviours through a lens of masquerade, play, costuming and storytelling. Embracing a highly collaborative mode of working, she has developed ongoing exchanges with dancers and musicians, and has worked closely with the artist Benito Mayor Vallejo since 2006. For “Rough Hands Weave A Knife”, her first solo exhibition in France, Zadie Xa presents new works spanning diverse mediums that reflect on ideas of interspecies communication and transmutation, world-building and symbols of protection and power.  The title of the exhibition, “Rough hands weave a knife”, originated when the artist noticed the roughness of her own hands during the physically intense process of making the works on view. The titular knife is an extension of the symbolism of power and protection that runs throughout the exhibition, but also nods to modes of manual creation, particularly within domestic spheres, similarly reflecting a valorisation of the manual work involved in artistic practices that draw on craft traditions. Across expansive landscapes that span monumental, and, in some cases, polyptych paintings, Xa combines memories of the Pacific Northwest, where she grew up, Korean landscapes studied through photography and historical painting, and fictional elements into composite topographies that recall the dreamlike world-building achieved by science fiction and fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta: an important reference for the artist. As she explains: ‘this amalgamation of different spaces into something desired but abstract is a visual reflection on metaphysical ideas of homeland’: a reformulation of landscape through diasporic experience. Tying it to the art-historical landscape of its surroundings, Xa cites Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, painters of the Parisian Symbolist movement in the late 19th century, as inspirations for her new group of paintings. ‘I’ve always been interested in semiotics and signs and symbols’, the artist explains, but the fantastical pastoral scenes in these new works betray this particular influence. On view alongside the artist’s most recent paintings and textile works is a group of four bronze sculptures, which represents a new facet of her practice. These sculptures were created in collaboration with the artist Benito Mayor Vallejo, with whom Xa has worked closely since 2006. They also represent concentrations of talismanic power within the symbolic visual language that runs throughout the exhibition. Cast in bronze, a material the artist is working with for the first time, they take on an imposing new weight and a scale within her practice. At the entrance to the exhibition is a sculpture made up of intertwined creatures, all facing different directions so that no matter the angle from which it is observed, it is always looking back at the viewer. One of the creatures represented is a haetae: a Korean mythological animal often placed at the entrances of civic buildings to protect and to judge and refuse entry to the wicked. “Bojagi” are made by patchworking scraps of fabric: often silk. Though inspired by traditional Korean techniques, the artist replaces the typical materials with fabrics that have gained popularity much more recently, such as the denim used in the outer layer of this work, referencing the fashion trends familiar to the artist from her upbringing in Canada. Xa’s use of such fabrics in her textile works materialises her exploration of diasporic identities by addressing the role of fashion and of fabric choices in self-presentation. Guided by the principles of interdisciplinarity and immersivity, Xa views every exhibition as a work of art in itself, and as a continuation of the universes created in previous exhibitions. Each painting is linked to the others through unexpected visual resonances or repetitions, while several of the characters voyage between paintings and even across mediums, slipping in and out of sight as the visitor moves through the exhibition to give an impression of non-linear time and of multiple parallel yet connected universes. Among the characters that recur between works is Princess Bari, conductor of the souls of the dead to the afterlife in Korean mythology, who reappears in several of the paintings on view. Three of the sculptures on view are based on characters from performances the artist presented at the Venice Biennale (2019) and at the National Gallery, London (2021), and reference Korean funerary dolls, which would traditionally be carved in wood and placed on the casket to accompany the dead on their journey to the next world, providing protection, care or entertainment along the way. The foxes, crows and seagulls that weave in and out of the exhibition are drawn from the artist’s urban reality, while other characters – cloaked figures with birds’ heads or feathered tails – are imagined hybrids. For Xa, animals carry abundant allegorical power, just as they do in Korean folklore and mythology, which also offers the artist a rich pool of creatures and characters with which to people her paintings. The nine-tailed fox, or kumiho, is a metamorphic spirit found in Japanese, Chinese and South Korean mythology capable of shapeshifting into a ravishing woman in order to entrap and devour men, thereby becoming human itself. Recurring across Xa’s work, it embodies what the artist explains as the ‘trickster’ archetype: a disruptive outsider whose presence both provokes and inspires change in dominant social and cultural orders. Clothes and costumes inspired by traditional Korean garments are also a key aspect of Xa’s practice, both worn in her performances and presented as standalone pieces.

Photo: Zadie Xa, Vancouver Shoreline, 2024 Sewn fabrics and wooden rod 130 x 170 cm (51.18 x 66.93 in), © Zadie Xa, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, France, Duration: 12/4-25/5/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net/