Tag: Chinese

A colourful papercut by Xiyadie. It shows four abstracted figures, all with phalluses, in what appears to be a garden. Two red ornamental doors with yellow studs and feline decorative handles stand open behind the figures. The flowers and the branches that span above the figures seem to sprout from the figures themselves.
GATE 门, 1999

GATE 门, 1999

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Artist: Xiyadie
Media: Papercut, Water-Based Dye, and Chinese Pigments using Xuan Paper
Date & Location: 1999, Beijing
Image Source: Nome Gallery. Photo by Gianmarco Bresadola.

Significance to Queer Art History

Xiyadie (pseudonym) is the first known queer artist to carry on the traditional practice of papercutting in China, which has its roots in the Eastern Han Dynasty (Bao, 157 and Nome Gallery). He was born in Heyang County, Shaanxi Province and is now living in Beijing. His artwork often explores the lives of queer people who are living in rural China specifically. His pseudonym, which means ‘Siberian Butterfly,’ was chosen so that the butterfly surviving in a harsh environment could signify “the difficulty of living a gay life in a sexually conservative society (Bao, 158).”

As Bao explores in the article cited below, Xiyadie’s work also blurs categories of ‘craft’ and ‘art,’ which in itself might be read as a queer defiance of categories.

A colourful papercut by Xiyadie. It shows four abstracted figures, all with phalluses, in what appears to be a garden. Two red ornamental doors with yellow studs and feline decorative handles stand open behind the figures. The flowers and the branches that span above the figures seem to sprout from the figures themselves.
Xiyadie, GATE 门, 1999

Resources

Bao, Hongwei. Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.

Nome Gallery. Xiyadie. 2016. https://nomegallery.com/artists/xiyadie/.

A coloured sketch of a bare-chested Indigenous man wearing a red necklace on white paper with a white man's arm wrapping around from behind to touch his chest.
Did you meet any malagas? (book cover)

Did you meet any malagas? (book cover)

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Artist: Gary Lee
Media: Sketch on paper
Date & Location: 1993, Larrakia Territory, Darwin, Australia
Where can I see this artwork?: Book cover of Did you meet any malagas?: A homosexual history of Australia’s tropical capital by Dino Hodge

Significance to Queer Art History

‘Malagas’ means ‘men.’ Dino Hodge’s Did you meet any malagas? is a collection of oral histories intended to tell a ‘gay history’ of Larrakia territory/Darwin that recognizes local, context-specific intersections of sexuality, gender, colonialism, and race. It addresses as well the objectification of ‘blackfellas’ by ‘whitefellas’ in the local gay community. Hodge writes that “it would be the late 1980s before Aboriginal gay men felt comfortable attending Darwin Gay Society Gatherings (37).”

Gary Lee was the first Indigenous person to collaborate with the Northern Territory AIDS Council, and he is a friend and collaborator to Hodge. He is Larrakia with Chinese and Filipino heritage, and Hodge writes that Lee designed a book cover that: “honoured blackfella experiences… his interracial relationship with his partner is represented by a whitefella arm reaching across his chest and the hand resting lightly above his heart. Here the whitefella presence is subordinated to a blackfella declaration of personhood (41).”

A coloured sketch of a bare-chested Indigenous man wearing a red necklace on white paper with a white man's arm wrapping around from behind to touch his chest.

Resources and Image Credits

Dino Hodge. “Faces of Queer-Aboriginality in Australia,” in Queer Objects ed. Chris Brickell and Judith Collard. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019.

Hodge, Dino. Colouring the Rainbow: Blak Queer and Trans Perspectives: Life Stories and Essays by First Nations People of Australia. 2015.