Anglim/Trimble is pleased to present our exhibition Enduring Stories: Sculptures by Xiaoze Xie.
On June 22, 1900, the Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu noticed a crack in the wall of the Mogao Caves and inadvertently discovered a small, sealed chamber. This room, known as Cave 17 or The Library Cave, hid more than 50,000 pieces of Buddhist scripture, secular documents, embroidery, silk paintings and other cultural relics from the 4th to 11th centuries A.D. These artifacts were so numerous and rich in content that they became known as the “Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages.” After the discovery of the Library Cave, European explorers purchased relics at dishonest prices, and most of the artifacts were scattered in museums and libraries throughout the world, with only a small portion remaining in China. Cave 17, once housing more than six hundred years of history and culture, is now empty.
Enduring Stories: Sculptures by Xiaoze Xie unites two groups of research-based work: resin sculptures from Xie’s project Amber of History (2017-), inspired by the troubled history of the Library Cave’s once encyclopedic content, and porcelain works from Forbidden Memories (2012-), a project exploring banned books and censorship in different sociopolitical contexts throughout Chinese history.
Xiaoze Xie, known for his paintings and installations, began working with porcelain in Jingdezhen (Jiangxi Province, China), known as “the Capital of Porcelain,” in 2016. In Forbidden Memories, each work is a life-size recreation of an existing book, based on photographs Xie took at public libraries and from his own collection. Xie uses the traditional blue and white porcelain process as well as innovative hand-sculpting and hand-painting techniques. Firing in porcelain evokes the burning of books; after high firing, the sculptures become solid and seem strong, but are at the same time fragile, like culture and memory.
In 2017, Xie completed an artist residency at the Dunhuang Academy, which oversees the preservation of the Mogao Caves, where he created the project Amber of History: Reimagining the Library Cave at Dunhuang. Amber of History presents 3D blueprints for sculptures and installations yet to be realized, evoking the cave’s legacy as a time capsule which preserves the genes of Chinese culture. It brings together diagrams, calligraphy, architecture, and sketches on a long ink scroll modeled after Dunhuang manuscripts.
The resin sculpture series Rain of Languages recreates the physical form of Cave 17, based on architectural diagrams, and features keywords that appear in canonical Buddhist scriptures. Words were cut from a sheet of film and cast inside layers of amber-colored resin, creating the effects of characters sinking, floating and dispersing in the space of the Cave. Characters related to worldly desires and suffering sink to the bottom, and words pointing to enlightenment, liberation, and emptiness ascend to the top. One work features embedded words from a love poem written in Tocharian, and in another, the rich color combinations of Tang Dynasty paintings are transformed into strata of abstract patterns.
Xie’s new installation Models of the Universe is based on Amber of History drawings which depict Buddhist cosmologies like “The Three Realms and Nine Levels” and Mandalas representing the Dharma. Slowly changing complex spatial structures that represent the abstract orders of the world are projected onto a scale model of the Library Cave. Enduring Stories: Sculptures by Xiaoze Xie honors preserved historical records while mourning those lost and mistreated, creates a space to experience Buddhist cosmology, and explores the vulnerability of history and culture.
Please join us for a reception on Saturday, February 8 from 4-6 pm in our upstairs gallery at Minnesota Street Project.
The exhibition is on view through Saturday, March 29.
Xiaoze Xie (b. 1966, Guangdong, China) received his MFA from the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing and the University of North Texas and a BSE in Architecture from Tsinghua University. Xie has exhibited extensively, including recent solo exhibitions at the Asia Society Museum in New York City and the Denver Art Museum. His work is in permanent collections of institutions such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, and San Francisco Asian Art Museum. Xie recently received the Asia Game Changer West Award from the Asia Society Northern California. He is the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University.
