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.
Zadie Xa at work, 2024
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.
Zadie Xa with The wellspring of childhood (Vancouver Sunset), 2024
At the heart of the 2022 Whitechapel show was a large, 3D fabric installation inspired by a hanok, a traditional Korean home, featuring “shape-shifter” characters, animal motifs and shamanistic figures, both as paintings and as sculptures. The fox in particular is a potent symbol for Xa, given its multiple identities in different cultures. “The fox is seen as the sly trickster in European settings, a maligned city pest,” she says. “But in East Asia, foxes are associated with being shape-shifters. I think about this a lot: the idea that people need to shape-shift within society. You see this clearly within immigrant families who code-switch to be seen as more palatable in Western society.”
This autumn, the fox will be present in Xa’s paintings on view at Thaddaeus Ropac, and at the gallery’s booth at Frieze art fair. Her cover for Bazaar Art, The Wellspring of Childhood (Vancouver Sunset) (2024), continues her bojagi series, while the shell at the centre represents a vessel for knowledge transmission and refers to Hilma af Klint’s shell paintings.
Xa with her Bazaar Art cover
Its colours were inspired by a trip home at the end of August. “The first evening I arrived at the city beach,” she says, “I was greeted by the most beautiful, vivid peachy sunset and sparkling coastline. My time in Vancouver was spent retracing childhood excursions that provoked a sense of home and connection to my youth that is often obscured by the daily grind of London.” And so Xa weaves the threads of her identities into a most uplifting whole.
The 2024 Bazaar Art supplement is available with the November issue of Harper’s Bazaar, out now.