Xie Hong

Born in Beijing in 1959, Xie Hong spent her working life as a librarian. To alleviate her chronic depression, she began, in 2007, to draw compulsively. 

For the following two years, the mere fact of spending several hours daily on drawing, allowing her hand to run over the surface of the paper, relieved her suffering and brought her some well-being. By 2009, her lines were gaining in fluidity and regularity, but she had no control over her compositions. While she was drawing, she had the impression that her mouth “was full of beans that she had to chew.”

In 2010, she found it difficult to continue her creative activity and for a short period her motifs began resembling cellular divisions, alluding to the formation of life. Xie retired recently and she has started to work on larger-sized sheets of rice paper. The interior world expressed in macro- and microscopic views and the exploration of both the infinitely small and infinitely large seem to have become her prevailing themes.