Installation view of "Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything" (2025), created by Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo for this year's Sharjah Biennial, at Al Hamriyah Studios in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates / Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation and Thaddaeus Ropac

SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — At Al Hamriyah Studios, once the site of a bustling vegetable "souq" (market) on Sharjah's coast, Korean Canadian artist Zadie Xa conjures a world of ancestral echoes. Her hanging shells, Korean shamanistic bells and folklore-inspired canvases transform the stark white-cube venue into an enchanting portal to the past.

Much like the adjacent sea, which carries the layered histories of those who have crossed its waters, Xa's multimedia installation — awash in hazy pastels and hypnotic chanting — becomes a spiritual realm, embodying cultural memory, inheritance and the unseen threads that bind generations together.

Xa's "Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything," created in collaboration with her longtime partner Benito Mayor Vallejo for this year's Sharjah Biennial, is a color-drenched spectacle of paintings, murals, sonic narratives and more than 1,000 brass bells.

The installation encapsulates what has been at the crux of her practice for the past decade: an exploration of Korean shamanism and folklore as a lens to engage with matrilineal knowledge, diasporic identities and the power of transgression.

Zadie Xa's "Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything" / Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation and Thaddaeus Ropac

Raised in a Catholic family that immigrated to Canada in the 1970s, Xa had no exposure to the shamanistic traditions of her ancestral homeland during childhood. It wasn't until her early 30s that she stumbled upon this often woman-led spiritual practice — one that transcended the rigid gender norms of neo-Confucian Korean society — "by a total fluke."

The catalyst was a bizarre 1977 folk horror film, "Io Island," directed by Kim Ki-young and set on a mysterious Korean island ruled by women.

Korean Canadian artist Zadie Xa / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

"Growing up in the West, my understanding of the way East Asian women were presented in the media was very specific: very feminine and (soft-spoken.) But in this movie, there's a shaman whose attitude reminded me of the women that I actually knew — who could be aggressive, vulgar and visceral," she told The Korea Times.

She soon embarked on a quest to learn more about the "scary, fascinating, compelling" world that was shamanism.

"It was sad to find out that this ancestral indigenous culture and religion in Korea had been suppressed and maligned for so many centuries by different powers, whether it was the introduction of other religions coming from China or (modern) governments trying to erase its traces," the artist said.

"Even my mom wouldn't talk about it and if I brought it up with my family, they would be very uncomfortable."

In shamans — transgressive outcasts, who existed in a space where gender roles were bent and elderly women could shout and yell to commune with the forces beyond — Xa found a profound metaphor for voices speaking from the tabooed margins of society.

Zadie Xa's "Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything" / Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation and Thaddaeus Ropac

Zadie Xa's "Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything" / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

At the Sharjah gallery, a new mobile sculpture titled "Ghost," an intricate web of over 1,000 clanging bells, draws inspiration from both Korean shamanic ceremonial rattles and seashell wind chimes that summon ancestral spirits.

From her conch shell-shaped speakers — one of which is modeled after Jeju Island's native turban shells — ritualistic chants emanate, channeling "Salpuri," or a Korean exorcism dance.

And her brilliantly colored canvases blur the boundaries between the secular and the supernatural. They teem with the dynamic choreography of Ahn Eun-me, "who, for me, is like the contemporary shaman"; animated skeletons performing the "Danse Macabre" and "Bake-kujira," the spectral skeletal whale of Japanese folklore.

Zadie Xa's "Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything" / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Another unexpected cultural reference point for Xa is "bojagi," the traditional Korean wrapping cloth.

Her figurative paintings on view are framed by sewn bojagi-like patchwork, a nod to a women-centered craft that transformed scrap fabrics into coverings for items of importance.

"I studied painting in my undergrad and my master's, and there was always a strong emphasis on abstraction — something I wasn't interested in at the time because it felt very male, American and Eurocentric," she said.

As she grew older, the artist began to notice how Korean textiles resembled American modernist color field paintings. And at the same time, she observed a resurgence of similar textile work, such as the Gee's Bend quiltmakers of Alabama — descendants of enslaved people whose sewn masterpieces conjured striking abstract imagery.

"A lot of these American painters probably saw works like these and incorporated them into their own art, as artists do. But at the end of the day, all the credit and attention went to these specific American painters," she explained.

"So, for me, it was important to have artistic reference points that were away from that — things that existed at the same time or even predated American modernism and the art historical narratives we tend to focus on."

For Xa, her multidisciplinary practice remains a way to anchor herself in the present.

"As a diasporic person, you have a desire to be closer to your family's culture but there's always a distance," she said. "The Korean shaman, for me, is a way in which I feel like I have a connection to history, to my ancestors, to the people in the past who make us feel rooted."