The MoMa Library paintings are Xie’s most recent works in a recurring series of paintings devoted to the depiction of library archives. Numbered consecutively in accordance with an iterative bibliographic system, this series began in 1993 with Library No. 1 and has featured holdings from libraries in Denton, Tuscon, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong Province. There is a sense that the paintings oscillate between the coldly analytical and the romantically monumental. More substantively, the regular repetition of equally-spaced horizontal shelves that extend from one side of the painting to the other suggest the serial repetition of Minimalist painting. At the same time as Xie’s work brings to mind Minimalism, it also suggest the tradition of Old Master still lifes. (excerpt from The Ruins of Modernism: Xiaoze Xie’s The MoMa Library by Roger Rothman, 2006).