Romantic with a heart of glass

Her work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Germany, and the United States.

Among the first group of people to work with glass as an artistic medium in China, Xie started studying the material in 2006 at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, the first year a glass art course was introduced. "I feel it was not me choosing glass, but glass choosing me. What I learned at school was more like traditional sculpture using glass as a medium," she says, adding that at the time, it was a lesser-known major, and due to the lack of facilities, she didn't learn techniques like glassblowing at school.

Xie later studied in Britain, and received a Master of Arts degree from London's Royal College of Art in 2012. "During my time there, I realized for the first time that I didn't want to be a glass artist, but rather an artist who works with glass as a medium," Xie says.