Despite the vivid, recognizable aesthetic of Zadie Xa’s new solo exhibition at London’s Pump House gallery, it was a challenge to form a holistic sense of the Korean-Canadian artist’s slippery concoction of media, music and color. While this might often be good reason to dismiss an exhibition, the dense material in “The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell” was thoughtfully curated with reference to a wider personal and artistic enquiry. The confusion and occasional dissonance generated by the artist reflected the show’s subject.

Xa was raised in Vancouver by a particularly private mother who—perhaps to ease assimilation—did little to pass on a sense of Korean identity, and therefore grew up within a predominantly North American pop-cultural context. When the artist later became curious about her Korean identity, rather than look to the country’s contemporary culture in which she held little stake, Xa turned to the past, researching Muism, or Korean Shamanism, which existed before other cultural and religious systems were developed on the peninsula.

The presentation in the gallery’s downstairs room—collectively titled The Sea Child, Octopus and Brass Bell (2017)—had objects mounted on walls as per a conventional exhibition, but some of these were as much artefacts as artworks, including both past works and found objects. A mask that Xa bought when visiting Jeju Island, used as part of the goseong ogwangdae—a traditional Korean masked dance—was hung above a collection of four shells and a piece of driftwood she had also assembled. On an adjacent wall was a vivid fabric wall-hanging, Fishscales and Poisonous Darts (2016) replete with fabric knives, bright green artificial hair and a three-color taegeuk (in yellow, red and blue), a symbol closely associated with Muism.

The rest of the building, and the exhibition, contained the sprawling, eponymous installation, The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell (2017) which brought together diverse influences on both Xa’s art and identity into an immersive, loosely narrative experience.

On the wall adjacent to the staircase leading to the first floor was a prismatic, rippling projection evoking light refracted underwater and accompanied by an appropriately oceanic soundtrack. The use of the stairwell suggests liminality—reflecting the psychological state of living between two identities—but also an implied ascension toward something else.

In the near darkness of the first floor gallery, to which further projections lent the ambience of an undersea cavern, were more masks and a hanging trio of empty, brightly colored robes. The heredity system of Muism is matrilineal, with the title of shaman primarily being passed down by the mother, and these empty robes and flattened figures seemed to demand filling out by a hitherto undefined lineage and body of knowledge.

Maintaining the same underwater aesthetic, a further staircase led to the upper gallery, in which the light emitted by a ceiling-high, two-channel video installation created a sense of surfacing. The video, like the exhibition as a whole, is a colorful mixture of images and themes. There are moments of more obvious symbolism: footage of the artist asleep on one channel, paired with an aerial shot of her entering a hedge maze at the beginning of the film, is complemented near the end with a scene of her ascending a tower at its center, mirroring the sense of progression in the exhibition as a whole. However, most of the film is structured around a loose fantasy narrative describing three generations of women, the second of which—representing Xa’s mother—was a “sea child” who left for land and birthed a daughter. To a soundtrack of both traditional music and instrumental hip hop, and accompanied by images of rock pools, octopuses and Xa dancing in her shamanic robes, the story allegorically evokes the artist’s own history, but also recalls the haenyeo (“sea women”) of the aforementioned Jeju Island—where the video was filmed—who have famously dived for seaweed and shellfish since the 17th century. It is difficult to conceive of this tangled conflation of themes and images linearly. Rather, expanding imaginatively on diverse fragments of cultural knowledge, the installation has the texture of a dream.

Despite this quality, with its suggestion of chronology and discovery, Xa retained a sense of direction that extends to the exhibition and her practice as a whole: an ascension to a kind of self-knowledge that, ultimately, appears only in part to be rooted in a preformed—or performed—cultural identity. Using fragments of previous works and exhibitions to develop an aesthetic of her own, Xa is not only assuming a culture, but also creating one.

Zadie Xa’s “The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell” is on view at Pump House gallery, London, until September 24, 2017.

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