Emily Xie — Memories of Qilin

2022

Artists: Emily Xie · Year: 2022 · Medium: Long-form generative collage — algorithmic compositions referencing East Asian classical painting and ukiyo-e · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript; Ethereum via Art Blocks Curated; on-chain renderer · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Art Blocks Curated (Project 282) Emily Xie is a New York-based generative artist who came to the medium through self-teaching: she studied art history (History of Art and Architecture as an undergraduate) rather than computer science, then encountered Daniel Shiffman's Coding Train tutorials, left a software-engineering position to attend a programmers' retreat, and completed a residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn in 2016 working with sensors, installation and 3D code. She has been a contributor to the p5.js open-source project for years. Memories of Qilin, released on Art Blocks Curated in March 2022 as a 1024-edition long-form work, is the piece that crystallized her position in the field. The algorithm composes generative collages whose vocabulary is drawn from East Asian classical painting — fluid washes that read as ink-and-water, layered against ukiyo-e woodblock pattern fields, animal-and-landscape motifs that gesture at the qilin of the title (a mythological chimera associated in Chinese lore with prosperity and benevolence). Six months of development sit behind the piece. Each output composes its painted, printed, and stenciled elements differently; the cultural reference set is consistent but the compositional outcome is not. The work occupies a distinctive position in the Art Blocks Curated catalogue. Most of the curated tier through 2021–22 was European or North American in formal lineage — Cherniak, Hobbs, Snowfro, Dmitri, Rizzolli. Xie's project explicitly extends the curated tier's reach into East Asian visual tradition, and does so without exoticizing it: the algorithm is hers, the references are hers, the cultural specificity is treated as native rather than as material. Xie has subsequently produced Generative Patchwork and Bullseye for LACMA's 2023 Remembrance of Things Future exhibition, with proceeds supporting the LACMA Art + Technology Lab. The work was inspired by Martha Lou Jones's Bullseye quilt (1896), placing Xie inside the same African-American-quilt-conversation lineage that Anna Lucia's Gee's Bend collaboration also extended into. Lore Xie has spoken about Memories of Qilin as a deliberately personal release — the cultural reference set is drawn from her own family's visual upbringing rather than from research, and the title's qilin is a creature she remembers from childhood storybooks before she ever encountered it in academic Chinese-art literature. She wrote about the LACMA residency in an Unframed essay arguing that blockchain art should be evaluated on the same critical terms as any other contemporary medium rather than treated as a separate category. Sources • Art Blocks — Memories of Qilin (Project 282). • Xie, Emily — emilyxie.art (artist site, projects archive). • Art Blocks — In Conversation with Emily Xie (Medium). • LACMA Unframed — Remembrance of Things Future, conversation with Emily Xie (2023). • The Monty Report — Emily Xie profile.