Xiaoze Xie's dusky, expressive paintings of decaying books and casually stacked piles of newspapers evoke the tenuous nature of historical memory. Knowledge may be abstract, but it is housed in material containers which may rot, disintegrate, burn, or otherwise betray their purpose. And this vulnerability, in turn, is merely a concrete symbol of the susceptibility of supposedly "certain" knowledge to the distortions of ideology.

--Eleanor Heartney, 2004