Born in Guangdong, China in 1966, Xie Xiaoze graduated from Tsinghua University and the Central Academy of Arts and Design, Beijing before moving to the United States and settling in Texas where he continued his studies in a very different environment. He is currently the Paul & Phyllis Wattis Professor in Art in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University, California, USA. As a realist painter by vocation, early in his career Xie found a way to combine his passionate interest in Chinese history and current world events with more formal concerns by focusing on the materials stored in archives and library stacks as the subject matter of his paintings. Every three or four years Xie has widened the scope of his thematic material, an adjustment that frequently requires a reconsideration of the emphasis placed on verisimilitude and abstraction in the individual works.