In the late 1990s, Xie expanded his oeuvre, painting library stacks of consecutive, folded newspapers that critic Roberta Smith described as a "conceptually based way of measuring time and history." In the aftermath of &lt;a href="9/11"&gt;9/11&lt;/a&gt;, the work took on greater urgency as Xie chose eventful periods—the U.S. during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, China during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the Beijing Olympics—to more sharply comment on world events. Writers suggest that the "Newspaper" paintings capture the chaotic, fleeting nature of the periodical—the immediacy and urgency of events upon publication and their quiet aftermath as yesterday's news, as well as their relentless (often numbing) accumulation of information in an age of media saturation.