Imagine the house of your wildest dreams—complete with your dream car, designer handbags and shoes, and more money and gold than you could ever spend. In Taiwan, replicas of these luxury items, crafted from bamboo frames and colored paper, are commonly seen at funerals and ceremonies honoring the deceased. Made with astonishing realism, often life-sized, they are burned in rituals to send them to the afterlife, where spirits are believed to need comforts and possessions just like the living.

This tradition of creating paper effigies for ancestral worship, funerals, and festivals is known as zhizha, a Taoist folk craft in Taiwan. Skilled artisans, often from generations-old workshops, craft everything from gods and animals to money, flowers, and everyday essentials like food and clothing. Zhang Xu Zhan grew up in one such century-old Taipei workshop, learning these ceremonial techniques from childhood. Deeply rooted in Taiwanese ritual culture, he now applies these skills to video art, sculpture, and installations, using the same paper to create expressive papier-mâché puppets and dioramas for his stop-motion films.

His mesmerizing works are playful, surreal, absurd, and sometimes grotesque—influenced by artists like David Lynch and animators Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay. At 37, Zhang Xu explores how traditions evolve, blend, and cross borders, using paper as a medium to connect cultures.

In June, his immersive multimedia installation captivated audiences at the opening of the 12th Site Santa Fe International, a major art exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani (director of High Line Art and artistic director of the 2022 Venice Biennale). The show featured over 300 works by more than 70 artists across 14 venues.

At the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA), visitors enter a dimly lit gallery where coiled newspapers line the walls and ceiling, evoking a cave or the scales of a mythical creature. Here, Zhang Xu’s 16-minute film Compound Eyes of Tropical (2020–22) plays—a retelling of a Southeast Asian folktale where a clever mouse deer outsmarts crocodiles by leaping across their backs to cross a river. The film’s dramatic percussion soundtrack is visualized by animals playing tiny instruments.

Created over three years by a team of five in a cramped studio, the film won Best Animated Short at the 2022 Golden Horse Awards, the most prestigious honor in Chinese-language cinema.

MOIFA curator Laura Addison notes that visitors of all ages are spellbound by the story and Zhang Xu’s craftsmanship. “It’s rare for people to focus for 17 minutes in a museum,” she says, “but many watch the entire film and stay to see it again.”

MOIFA, home to the world’s largest folk art collection, finds Zhang Xu’s work a perfect fit. “He’s deeply connected to Taiwanese folk traditions but transforms them with his personal vision,” Addison says.

Alongside his work, the museum displays its own collection of funerary and ritual objects, including an elaborate Mexican Día de Muertos altar (ofrenda) and historical pieces like an 1880 Parisian grave wreath—creating a dialogue between global traditions of honoring the dead.Here’s a rewritten version of your text in fluent, natural English while preserving the original meaning:

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The exhibition features a late-19th-century ivory-colored immortelle—a mortuary wreath—from Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. These beaded wreaths were a fashionable alternative to fresh flowers in France. Also on display are Taiwanese zhizha (ceremonial paper objects) from the 1950s and ’60s, part of MOIFA’s collection. Zhang Xu identified some of their makers, and their names now accompany the works. “That’s the kind of meaningful connection this exhibition creates,” he says, “linking contemporary art with deep, place-based memory.”

The museum’s Taiwanese paper objects depict animals, angels, dancers, and puppets.

Alemani first saw Zhang Xu’s work last year while serving on an art prize jury and was struck by its craftsmanship and detail. “It looks simple, but the process is incredibly intricate,” she tells Vogue. “What I loved was the balance between a fairy-tale quality and something deeply ritualistic, rooted in his family and culture.”

She felt it was a perfect fit for MOIFA: “Folk art has a universal appeal—it’s accessible without being distant. I wanted this installation to resonate with children, everyday visitors, and contemporary art audiences alike. Contemporary art can offer fresh perspectives on existing collections.”

The line between folk and contemporary art has always been fluid, from 1940s Art Brut to feminist and conceptual artists reclaiming craft and tradition in the ’60s and ’70s, to today’s museums and art fairs embracing folk-inspired practices. Artists like Ai Weiwei, Nick Cave, El Anatsui, Kimsooja, and Jeffrey Gibson have all drawn from folk traditions.

For Zhang Xu, however, “Taiwanese ceremonial crafts weren’t considered art when I was growing up—they were part of survival.” He admits he sometimes wanted to escape the practice, though he now finds freedom in creating from his own vision rather than fulfilling customer orders.

“What makes my relationship to these materials unique,” he says, “is that I don’t see them as fixed cultural symbols. They’ve been part of my life for so long that I interact with them instinctively. I don’t view them from a distance but through lived experience.”

For example, in Taiwan, paper puppets are often displayed solemnly at funerals. But in his home, where they were stored in every available corner, “they’d hang from the ceiling like bats, waiting to be sold. These everyday memories help me avoid clichéd interpretations of tradition and find new ways to reimagine them.”

Zhang Xu says his father, who still works in the family trade, doesn’t fully understand his career—he critiques his animal sculptures as “not realistic enough”—but has heard friends praise his success. The artist has held solo shows in Asia and participated in group exhibitions and film festivals there and in Europe. Earlier this year, New York’s High Line screened his films. He’s now working on a new film about water lanterns across Asian traditions, from India to Vietnam, China, and Japan.

Cross-cultural connections in stories and traditions inspire much of his work. For instance, he first encountered the mouse-deer tale in Indonesia but later found variations in Taiwan and Japan with different animals. In the West, we know it as The Gingerbread Man. The Japanese fable Urashima Tarō—about a fisherman who visits an undersea palace—also resonates across cultures.

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This version keeps the original meaning while improving flow, simplifying complex phrasing, and ensuring natural readability. Let me know if you’d like any further refinements!A man spends what he thinks are just a few days in an underwater palace, only to find that a hundred years have passed—a story often likened to Rip Van Winkle. Similar tales exist in Irish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese folklore. In Compound Eyes, sharp-eyed viewers will notice the main character shifting forms—from mouse deer to mouse to rabbit—while crocodiles transform into crabs and buffalo in the blink of an eye, reflecting how characters in such stories often change roles across cultures.

Today, only a few families in Taiwan still craft traditional zhizha paper offerings. The late 20th century saw mass-produced, machine-printed versions flood the market, driving many artisans out of work. Younger generations, too, are losing touch with the craft and its cultural significance. Yet folk traditions rise and fall in popularity—those that endure adapt with time. “We see these as living traditions, part of an ongoing story,” Addison explains. “Our work reminds people these practices are still alive, not just relics of the past.”

The 12th Site Santa Fe International: Once Within a Time runs through January 12, 2026.