Romantic with a heart of glass

In 2017, she was invited for an artist-in-residence program in Shenzhen. For its three-month duration, Xie worked at the museum during the day, and made art at the craft factory at night. Her subsequent solo exhibition Form Form Form explored form in daily life. In another piece called Breathing, several transparent glass balls were squeezed into a glass tank, creating subtle tension, a reflection of her state of mind at the time, a mix of repression, self-denial and a yearning for life.

Xie quit her job in 2018 to become an independent artist. For the first few years, she had to make her art in factories that produced everyday objects or industrial goods, as she didn't have her own studio. This was also partially why she participated in artist-in-residence programs.

Her experiences resulted in the exhibition Strength Factory in 2023. "Strength" is a common topic that Xie has explored in her art, and "factory" referred not only to a workspace, but also to a place for her to observe life and interact with people.

Her relationship with factory workers influenced her art to varying degrees. One of the best examples is Floating Thread, which Xie created during her stay at the Nanhai Silk Factory in Foshan, Guangdong province, in 2022, where she saw female workers standing in front of large machines, their fingers rapidly moving over silk fibers thinner than a human hair.

These movements intrigued her, and she wanted to express their juxtaposition of lightness and strength; for example, she saw the women as sensitive, fluid, soft and tough. She made plaster casts of dozens of hand movements commonly used at the factory, and then in a glass factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong, she blew glass into the casts. After they cooled, a transparent hand was created.

Yang Xin, curator at Shanghai Museum of Glass, says that Floating Thread opens a window onto rarely seen parts of these workers' lives.