Author Archives: jolanta

Making art confronts me with more questions than answers. I am much too entangled and I lack analytical distance. I know too much. But I also know too little. If my work is any good, I don’t understand it myself. At least not right away. The work I make tends to overrun, and sometimes even […]

Catherine Y. Hsieh: Your solo exhibition Just Did It took place at James Cohan Gallery in New York City from February to March. In a piece titled It, you displayed a patch of dirt under a microscope. What did that dirt represent? Xu Zhen: It represented “hui” (dust,) what’s always below our feet, what we’re […]

I took my first photograph at the age of 13, at a time when cameras weren’t as accessible as they are now. My father lent me his old Kodak Retinet for a school field trip. It didn’t have a light meter, so each picture I took was a work of labor and conscious calculation. Then […]

The excitement I get from painting comes from the challenge of making it engage the world I experience, while consciously acknowledging such a dense and complicated history as a medium. I’m not trying to create “new” paintings, just ones that feel appropriate to our constantly changing world. I have always been interested in the twilight […]