Artist in profile: Zadie Xa
'Where the inspirations lie.'
Published: September 21, 2025
Zadie Xa creates installations that imagine alternative worlds.
Learn more about Xa and her work on this page – and plan your visit to the Turner Prize 2025.
Xa’s work explores themes such as spirituality, interspecies communication and cultural traditions, particularly from her own Korean and Canadian background.
Xa’s presentation Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything uses painting, sound, textiles, and sculpture to consider links between ocean life, generational grief, Korean shamanism and ghostly spirits. Xa’s work often involves collaboration, and she worked closely with artist Benito Mayor Vallejo to realise the exhibition design, mural and sculptural elements of this display.
Watch the video below to learn more about Zadie Xa and her inspiration.
Zadie Xa's inspiration
The Turner Prize 2025 nominated artists have selected literature or music to share that are important them or inspired the works on view
Listen to the playlist below and hear some of the tracks that inspire Zadie Xa, and check out her reading list below.
Texts
- David Brin – Startide Rising
- Adrienne Fitzpatrick – The Earth Remembers Everything
- Nikki Giovanni – Ego Tripping (There May be a Reason Why)
- Ursula K. Le Guin – Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences
- Ursula K. Le Guin – The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs – Dub: Finding Ceremony
- Dr Helen Hye-Sook Hwang – The Mago Way Re-discovering Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia (Volume 1)
- Merose Hwang – Ritual Specialists in Colonial Drag: Shamanic Interventions in 1920’s Korea
- Karin Amimoto Ingersoll – Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead
- Alice Walker – Calling All Grandmothers
