Xie Xiaoze

Xie Xiaoze is a Chinese diaspora known for his photo-realist paintings and long-term investigative projects on books, manuscripts and cultural history. Born in rural China, Xie was profoundly influenced by early memories of his father, a school principal, being forced to collect books for destruction during the Cultural Revolution. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1988, and a Master of Arts from Central Academy of Arts and Design in Beijing in 1991. He then moved to the United States in 1993 and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Texas. He now serves as the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. He splits his time between Beijing and Palo Alto, California.

Xie has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen, China; Asia Society, New York; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee, the US; Modern Chinese Art Foundation, Ghent, Belgium; and the China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing. 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 at eight universities across USA. Xie’s work has been collected by many major American institutions, including Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; San Jose Museum of Art, California; Oakland Museum of California; Boise Art Museum, Idaho; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Ohio; 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).