Through performance, video, painting and textiles, artist Zadie Xa interrogates the overlapping and conflation of cultures that inform self-conceptualized identities, notions of self and her experience within the Asian diaspora. Her layered textile works are sites for exploring contemporary identity construction and performance through cultural sampling, informed by her own experience within the Asian diaspora. Xa’s intricate, hand sewn wearable and performable garments stitch together familiar symbols used to identify Asian bodies as ‘other’ (the commodified yin-yang symbol, sword blades, lucky numbers, and ‘monolid’ eyes). Combating these with diverse references from a range of personally relevant imagery sourced from music, digital space, fashion, and art history. Xa has developed a system of personalized semiotics that propose entirely new images and objects, creating alternative Asian identity narratives often fantastical and within the realm of the supernatural.

All talks take place in Sculpture Studio (D1357) at ECU and are open to the public.