Tracing Memory at the Crow

Two Artists, Two Practices, One Persistent Question

There’s a through line running between the two exhibitions currently on view, or coming soon, at the Crow Museum of Asian Art in the Dallas Arts District, and it has nothing to do with medium or nationality or even aesthetic sensibility. Du Chau works in porcelain and piano wire. Xie Rong paints with her hair. One is Vietnamese American, the other Chinese-born and UK-based. What connects them is the specific problem both artists have devoted their practices to: what do you do with memory that won’t resolve?

Chau’s Tracing the Threads of Memory is on view now through March 2027. It’s built around his childhood in Vietnam, the plants, seeds, and food that anchor that time, and the long arc of his migration to Texas. The central piece, Seeds of Memory, grew for this show. Chau added new components to existing ones, which is exactly the kind of structural decision that reveals a philosophy: growth is additive, not linear, and the work should behave accordingly. It’s also the most formally ambitious thing he’s made, a shift in scale that feels deliberate rather than incidental.

His materials do a lot of the conceptual work. Porcelain is translucent, and light passing through it makes the form seem to hollow out, solid and absent at the same time. Chau has described this as a metaphor for lived experience: fragile but not breakable, beautiful but not precious. The piano wire suspending his pieces from the wall was built, originally, to carry sound. Now it carries memory instead. He leans into that. Memory, like music, doesn’t stop when the song does. It lingers somewhere in the body, long after the source is gone.

Xie Rong’s exhibition, The Rainbow My Mother Shows Me, opens in May 16 and runs through October 11. In April 2025, she came to the Crow and spent six days in a durational performance: one hour each day, making a painting using her hair as a brush, her canvas a long scroll that moved through the museum and outside it. Each day she added a new color. After each session, she sang a line from a Faye Wong song, after the storm, there isn’t always a beautiful sky, then spoke about what that day’s color meant, which memory it carried, which parent it pointed toward. The performance was called You Don’t Always See a Rainbow After Rain, and the exhibition frames what remains of it: photography, video, painting, objects, the residue of something that already happened, asking you to feel its weight anyway.

Both artists are working in aftermath. Chau through repetition, casting the same porcelain forms with slight variation until they accumulate into something larger than any single piece, and Xie through accretion, layering color over color until the canvas holds an entire emotional history without declaring it outright. Neither artist explains too much. The bitter gourds and willow branches in Chau’s work will read as decorative to some viewers and deeply personal to others; that gap is where the work lives. Xie’s reclamation of her birth name, having spent most of her career as Echo Morgan, isn’t incidental to the paintings. It’s the same argument made in a different register.

Chau’s biography is its own kind of accumulation. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1981, studied medical pathology, spent years as a pathology coordinator at Methodist Hospital in Dallas, and came to ceramics sideways through continuing education classes at Brookhaven College. He eventually went back to school at Alfred University, where serious ceramicists go, and returned to Dallas. He teaches at Dallas College now and still works in pathology. The discipline of both fields is visible in the work. He also co-founded Goldmark Cultural Center, a functional studio space for DFW artists. He’s not just making the work; he’s building the conditions for other people to make theirs.

Xie’s work is held by Staatliche Museen Berlin and Kensington Palace. She teaches at Chelsea College of Arts in London. This is her second engagement with the Crow, and the museum is clearly invested in the conversation her practice opens up: identity, migration, the body as a site of memory and resistance, the politics of what we choose to carry and what we leave behind.

That’s the question both exhibitions keep circling. Not whether memory can be preserved, but how it changes, distorts, and accumulates over time.