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Zadie Xa's journey through ritual, folklore and matrilineal legacies
Before I leave her studio, Zadie Xa gives me a print. It's one of my favourites by her, a work first exhibited in 2018 at her show "Soju Sipping on a Sojourn to Saturn," at the Galería Agustina Ferreyra in Mexico City. Titled Call Waiting, it's a painted textile work that shows two women standing in front of pinkred flames and a planet that looks like Venus; they are holding conches to their ears as if they were telephones, revealing the shells' fire-red, vulva-like apertures. When we first met, I told Xa that this work reminded me of one of my artistic obsessions: Soviet space-age painting of the kind I'd seen in Central Asian galleries. Xa explains that the image has its nexus much closer to home, even if home, family and domesticity are, for her, complicated concepts. She had originally wanted to use an image of her mother as a young woman, but her mother was too reticent, so Xa instead drew from vintage Korean advertisements, which her mother used to collect as a teenager-"an image of a woman whom my mom might have wanted to look like, and who serves, for me, as an avatar or weird parallel character," Xa says.
This personal history of displacement is a constant source of inspiration for Xa. She was born in Vancouver and raised by her mother, who had moved there from South Korea. She worked as a waitress for two years before going to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Xa graduated in 2007, and lived in Madrid for four and a half years before moving to London to study painting at the Royal College of Art. Her practice is varied, and, as a painting, Call Waiting is not typical of her recent work. Indeed, Xa says that traditional painting didn't suit her for "communicating the ideas I wanted to." The conch shell, however, is a recurring motif. Many of Xa's aesthetic inspirations sprang from her youthful engagement with pop culture, and she credits a trip to see the Disney movie The Little Mermaid in theatres with her mother as the moment that "made me feel like I wanted to make pictures." During...