Artist Zadie Xa on her signature multidisciplinary approach Xa brings her vibrant style to one of four Bazaar Art covers
By Helena Lee
In her light-filled east-London studio, the artist Zadie Xa is stroking the lining of a handbag that reminds me of the fluffy coats on the two excitable Pekingese dogs swarming around our feet. The bag is a pleasingly bright confection of patchworked textiles of knives and organic forms, with a tiger’s head on the side. It’s one of four limited-edition Lady Dior bags that she created for the French fashion house earlier this year.
It’s impossible to categorise Xa’s art. Her multidisciplinary approach encompasses everything from textiles – and handbags – to painting and performance, but it is always immersive and surprising, a masterclass in storytelling, often suffused with colour, and drawing on a range of influences including her Korean heritage and North American turn-of-the-century pop culture. In 2016, the Serpentine Galleries commissioned new work from Xa, combining Korean folk performance, ritualistic and spiritual practices, costume-making and traditional dance. Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of womenswear for Dior, first saw Xa’s work at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and, impressed by the textiles and the spiritual aspect of her narratives, went on to support her landmark solo show House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2022.
Assemblage that echoes bojagi, a style of Korean patchwork, is a technique Xa returns to again and again. As a teenager in Canada, she gravitated to Black American culture, finding relatable threads within the narratives in hip hop. “It was a link bridge into thinking critically about race and history, and what it was to be a non-white person in North America,” she says. At the same time, she “felt a profound sense of frustration” at the dearth of literature or information about the country of her parents’ birth.
This tension has manifested itself throughout her oeuvre, and is reflected in her own journey through different media. Xa trained in painting at London’s Royal College of Art but she does not consider herself a painter. “I think I’m someone whose ideas are rooted in painting,” she says. “I think of them almost as backdrops – part of a mise en scène that I need to anchor some of the ideas.” Her practice swiftly started to include textiles and performance and, after graduate school, she began making clothes that resembled sports jackets, layered with material, using heavy-duty double stitches as a nod to the way skateboarders would imprint labels of brands they wanted to be affiliated with. “Metaphorically speaking, it felt like stitching together identities, how we all combine different aspects of our personality,” she says.
