Zadie Xa: Weaving Ancestry Review of her exhibition at the Esker Foundation
By Lissa Robinson
Blending memories of the Pacific Northwest, her Korean roots, and fictional elements like folk tales and shamanistic rituals, Zadie Xa creates large, multisensory installations that explore historical traditions. She notes in an interview with Tate Gallery that folk art is “really the language of our ancestors directly to us” and a space where she finds “a sense of hope, and a desire for that resistance within the work.” Guided by this intuitive philosophy and using an interdisciplinary approach, Xa views each exhibition as a singular, immersive work, stitching together a rich and otherworldly narrative.
Her newest iteration weaves together two bodies of work: Rough Hands Weave a Knife, a series of paintings and sculptures Xa made in early 2024; and Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything (2025), a project created with her long-term collaborator Benito Mayor Vallejo. The two different exhibitions move lyrically across the hand-painted, cavernous rooms, drawing viewers into a dreamlike realm where mythology speaks, ghosts haunt, and diaspora sings.
Arranged in three sequential rooms at the Esker Foundation, the installation invites the viewer to enter the first space and walk progressively deeper.
Inside the first space, three figures sit on a large blue hexagonal plinth. Cast in bronze and finished with polished gold and oxidized green surfaces, these human-animal hybrids come alive against a lush and colourful backdrop. The walls are painted a deep teal, evoking deep, tranquil waters or an old-growth canopy. Five paintings, some framed or composed using bojagi, a multicoloured Korean patchwork technique, hang along the perimeter of the room. Filled with shamans and mystical beasts, they echo Xa and Vallejo’s imposing figurines, which reference Korean funerary dolls and are based on characters from Xa’s performances, like an orca playing a drum or a nine-tailed fox performing a handstand on human hands.
