Halfway into my conversation with Zadie Xa, raucous caws emanated from her end of the video chat. It turns out there was a nest of seagull chicks right outside the window of her London studio. “They’re celebrating. Apparently, they get excited because they’re going to fly and become independent,” Xa told me, conveying her research into the avian cries. Not coincidentally, a seagull stars as a narrator in her touring solo exhibition “Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers” (2020–21), alongside a cabbage, conch shell, orca, and fox. In the show’s audio work, the wise cabbage says, “All beings respond to the movement of Earth and her Moon, to the undulations of all planets, stars and cosmic bodies of the universe. This is Moon Poetics. How well do you know the land you grow on?” Through displays of patchwork capes, paintings, sculptures, and sound elements, Xa guides visitors to tune into the ecologies that we’re a part of, and that we have irreversibly damaged.
In imagining the worldviews of these five creatures, Xa also disrupts our familiarity with human-centric narratives and colonial epistemologies about the Earth, in favor of the unknown. Uncharted territories such as outer space and the deep sea form the backdrops of her other works, and function as metaphors for the unmeasurable distance between Xa, who grew up in Vancouver, and her Korean ancestors. The artist spoke to me about navigating the anxieties and freedoms of living in the diaspora, her artistic journey thus far, and the lost art of listening.
You initially trained as a painter at Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2003–07. What were your early artistic ambitions?
As a student, I was interested in identity politics, diasporas, as well as colonial representations of landscapes and the people that populate
