Emily Xie (Chinese-American, b. 1989) is a generative artist who writes code to translate the texture of textiles, quilts and collage into digital abstractions, treating algorithmic pattern-making as a kind of digital loom.,Trained in art history and formerly a software engineer, she left her corporate job in 2022 to make art full-time and lives and works in New York City.,
As a child, she has said, “cyberspace offered so much more to explore than my small hometown ever could”, and it was online that she discovered art, taught herself to draw, and built her first websites.She had worked as a software engineer before leaving that job in 2022 to become a full-time artist, just as institutions were beginning to embrace blockchain-based generative art.
Her generative collection Memories of Qilin launched on Art Blocks Curated in March 2022 as a long-form series of 1,024 collage-based outputs coded in p5.js, its patchwork forms alluding to the qilin, a chimeric creature from East Asian folklore, without ever depicting it directly.In 2023 she extended the same coded quilting technique into Interwoven, a series developed in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Her series Guardian Lion builds on techniques from Memories of Qilin to explore shapeshifting folklore forms, and she has likened her coded parameters to a “digital loom”.She cites the Bauhaus weavers Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl as influences on her use of contrasted color and repetitive geometry.
In 2022 she presented Flowers in Bloom in Unit London's “In Our Code” exhibition at Frieze London.In 2023 Xie curated “Evolving Pixels”, a collaboration between PROOF and Art Blocks exhibited at Venus Over Manhattan's Soho gallery to coincide with NFT.NYC, framing growth as the animating theme of generative systems.Her work has been shown at Times Square, the Singapore ArtScience Museum, Kunsthalle Zürich, Unit London, the Armory Show and Bright Moments, and Memories of Qilin was included in the Toledo Museum of Art's 2025 survey “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms”.,
