Alisan Atelier's exhibiting artist Xie Xiaoze will fly in from USA to Hong Kong during Art Basel Hong Kong to give a lecture for his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong "Xie Xiaoze: The Archaeology of Knowledge", and Xie is available for media interviews by appointment on March 25, 26, and 27.

This exhibition presents a thought-provoking selection of oil paintings, ink on paper and resin and porcelain sculptures- primarily drawing from Xie’s acclaimed Chinese Library series and Amber of History series. These works excavate the ancient poetics and contemporary relevance of books and knowledge.

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 thread-bound 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. Xie’s solo exhibition at Pingshan Art Museum in Shenzhen which ended in February 2025 was a showcase dedicated to this series of work.

Tracing Banned Books
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.
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Xie Xiaoze is a Chinese diaspora artist known for his photo-realist paintings and long-term investigative projects on books, manuscripts and cultural history. Xie received his Master of Fine Arts degrees from the Central Academy of Arts and Design in Beijing and from the University of North Texas. He is now the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. Xie has exhibited widely internationally, with solo exhibitions at British Library, London; Asia Society, New York; Denver Art Museum; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Knoxville Museum of Art; Modern Chinese Art Foundation in Ghent, Belgium; Tsinghua University Art Museum; China Art Archives and Warehouse in Beijing, and Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen, China. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art at the China Institute Gallery in New York and Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the traveling exhibition Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the US. Xie’s work has been acquired by many major institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, Boise Art Museum, Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and the Arizona State University Art Museum. Among other honours, Xie has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2013) and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003). He splits his time between Beijing and Palo Alto, California.

Aiisan Atelier's solo exhibition Archaeology of Knowledge is on view concurrently with Stanford Art Gallery's Ashes of Memory, and solo exhibition at Tsinghua University Art Museum, Beijing, China.

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assistant@alisan.com.hk

Xie Xiaoze will be in Hong Kong for media interviews by appointment on March 25, 26, and 27