Sapar Contemporary Gallery + Incubator

The recent work of Guangdong-born artist Xiaoze Xie pertinently, alarmingly mirrors current headlines. Both timely and urgent, it is merely the tip of similarly themed projects that have consumed Xie for decades, centered on the crucial role of books as the guardians of free expression and the repositories of civilization’s accumulated knowledge. At the heart of this ambitious and singular practice (it’s a conception of protest art that is not only politically pointed but also pictorially elegant) are two series of works, the “Library,” which he began in 1993, soon after he arrived in America, and the “Chinese Library” which he started in 1995, both ongoing. They depict books, often in rare editions, that represent the wisdom of multiple cultures and countries, discovered in libraries and other institutional archives without emphasis on the specific content. The latter, however, led to “Forbidden Memories: Tracing Banned Books in China” in 2012, a project that named names, focusing on books that have been banned in China, a prohibition that has been on the rise globally in recent years, including in the United States, despite First Amendment guarantees.