Zadie Xa weaves myth, memory, ancestry in color An interview with the artist . (This link opens in a new tab).
By Park Han-Sol
At Al Hamriyah Studios, once the site of a bustling vegetable "souq" (market) on Sharjah’s coast, Korean Canadian artist Zadie Xa conjures a world of ancestral echoes. Her hanging shells, Korean shamanistic bells and folklore-inspired canvases transform the stark white-cube venue into an enchanting portal to the past.
Much like the adjacent sea, which carries the layered histories of those who have crossed its waters, Xa’s multimedia installation — awash in hazy pastels and hypnotic chanting — becomes a spiritual realm, embodying cultural memory, inheritance and the unseen threads that bind generations together.
Xa’s “Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything,” created in collaboration with her longtime partner Benito Mayor Vallejo for this year’s Sharjah Biennial, is a color-drenched spectacle of paintings, murals, sonic narratives and more than 1,000 brass bells.
The installation encapsulates what has been at the crux of her practice for the past decade: an exploration of Korean shamanism and folklore as a lens to engage with matrilineal knowledge, diasporic identities and the power of transgression.
Raised in a Catholic family that immigrated to Canada in the 1970s, Xa had no exposure to the shamanistic traditions of her ancestral homeland during childhood. It wasn’t until her early 30s that she stumbled upon this often woman-led spiritual practice — one that transcended the rigid gender norms of neo-Confucian Korean society — “by a total fluke.”
The catalyst was a bizarre 1977 folk horror film, “Io Island,” directed by Kim Ki-young and set on a mysterious Korean island ruled by women.
“Growing up in the West, my understanding of the way East Asian women were presented in the media was very specific: very feminine and (soft-spoken.) But in this movie, there’s a shaman whose attitude reminded me of the women that I actually knew — who could be aggressive, vulgar and visceral,” she told The Korea Times.
