Xiaoze Xie
Xiaoze Xie (; born 1966 in Guangdong, China) is a Chinese-American visual artist and professor. He is based in Stanford, California, where Xie is currently the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. His art work includes painting, drawing, photography, installation, and video, the best-known of which are his monumental paintings of library books and newspapers, which explore the ephemeral nature of time, history and cultural memory. San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker described Xie's approach as pairing "relaxed photorealism" with "conceptual tautness;" others describe it as a "hybrid-like, postmodern blend" of traditional painting, Social Realism and contemporary documentary photography "laced with a decisively political undertone." Xie has had solo exhibitions at galleries throughout the world, and at institutions including the Asia Society Museum (New York), Denver Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Knoxville Museum of Art (survey, 2011), and Modern Chinese Art Foundation (Ghent, Belgium). He has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and his work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Denver Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, and San Jose Museum of Art, among others. Life and career Xie was born in Guangdong Province, China in 1966. After developing an interest in art as child, and in science and technology in high school, he chose to study architecture as a compromise, earning a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing (1988). A desire for a freer, less compromising career, however, compelled him to change to art. He enrolled at Central Academy of Arts and Design in Beijing, where he received a master's degree (1991) and honed a realistic style inflected by modernism. Like many Chinese students in the 1980s, Xie became interested in Western ideas. In 1991, his wife, Daxue Xu, received a scholarship to study physics at the University of North Texas, prompting a move to Denton, Texas. Xie enrolled in the art department there the next year (MFA, 1996), where he encountered postmodernism, inspiring him to combine his realist skills with contemporary ideas and issues. While in graduate school, he responded to his new American surroundings, painting scenes of junkyards, abandoned cars, and colorful, grocery-store abundance; he also initiated his soon-to-be signature "Library" works. In 1999, Xie began teaching at Bucknell University, while also pursuing exhibitions throughout the United States and in China; solo shows at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2000) and Charles Cowles Gallery (New York, 2002, 2004) soon followed, bringing him his first major critical attention. He has since had solo exhibitions at Chambers Fine Art (New York/Beijing), Anglim Gilbert Gallery (San Francisco), Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Toronto), Zolla/Lieberman (Chicago), Moatti Masters/Contemporary (London) and Gaain Gallery, (Seoul, Korea), among other venues. Xie taught at Bucknell until 2009, serving as Chair of the Department of Art & Art History from 2007–9. In 2009, he accepted a position at Stanford University, where he continues to teach. Work and reception Xie's art spans diverse media, but is