China lgbtq art

b. 1963, China

Xiyadie is a self-taught traditional Chinese papercut artist who starting creating works with homoerotic themes to tell his narrative of transformation. Xiyadie means Siberian Butterfly, a identify he chose after his move to Beijing as a migrant worker in the early 2000s, where he found an accepting community in the burgeoning gay subcultural scene. As he relates, the Siberian Butterfly is a northern creature. Surviving in the harshest conditions, it maintains its vanity and pursuit of freedom in an environment that does not lend political agency or representation to queer-identifying people.

In the late 1980s, his native Shaanxi Province was a centre for the preservation of folk arts including papercutting, which originates in the Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220 CE). Xiyadie subverts this historical create by depicting scenes of queer eroticism, where human beings are fused with nature and gay virility combines with the fertility of gardens and animal life. Due to the thinness of Chinese rice paper traditionally used for this craft, each function is made in editions, though the artist also works with materials enjoy newspaper and silk, intricately cut and dyed by hand.

Xiyad

Major LGBTQ+ exhibition tests the waters of free speech in Hong Kong

Billed as “the first major survey exhibition on LGBTQ+ perspectives in Hong Kong”, Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III tests the current waters for free speech in a fast-changing city. Held at Tai Kwun Contemporary (until 10 April), it is the third installment of the Sunpride Foundation’s Spectrosynthesis exhibition series on LGBTQ+ Asian art.

Though censorship has been ramping up in Hong Kong, only one operate has been removed from the show. A video from Shu Lea Cheang’s series 3x3x6, depicting ten stories of jailed sexual non-conformists, is replaced in the exhibition by a document of rejection, purportedly for explicit sexual content. Cheang’s piece was originally created for the 2019 Venice Biennale and shown in the Palazzo delle Prigioni, which, like Tai Kwun, is a former prison. The Art Newspaper also understands that a participating Indian artist consented to altering a work.

Hong Kong’s art world is rightly nervous about “mainlandisation” though. While China’s art community has a big, mostly accepted LGBTQ+ contingent, many artists remain publicly closeted, and international homosexual artists get “stra

Asia’s first major LGBTQ exhibition is opening this week

In a historical move, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei will be the first major-scale public institution in Asia to host an art exhibition entirely focused on the history and struggles faced by the continent’s LGBTQ community.

Spectrosynthesis – Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now has been in the works for over two years, andwill showcase 51 creations by 22 artists hailing from Taiwan, Singapore, China and Hong Kong, as well as Chinese-American artists based in North America.

The MOCA Taipei website explains: “The exhibition represents the life stories and related issues of the post-war Chinese LGBTQ collective as the artworks on view touch upon a profusion of subject matters such as identity, equality, exploitation by mass media, social predicaments, comments on individuals/groups, human desire, as well as life and death.”

Ku Fu-sheng, “The Room at the Top of the Stairs”, 1983. Courtesy of MOCA Taipei.

Ming Wong, “Life and Death in Venice” (Video), 2010. Courtesy of MOCA Taipei

The opening of the Spectrosynthesis is taking place only four months after a landmark ruling in the country that determined the then-

The bumpy road to acceptance of China's LGBTQ+ artists is explored in a new anthology

“This is very depressing, and it hurts,” writes Chinese designer Xiyadie, of living in a still “largely traditional sociocultural environment” as a gay man. Xiyadie, a pseudonym interpreting as Siberian Butterfly, documents through traditional-style papercuts his closeted life in mainland China’s rural, conservative north east before migrating to Beijing.

In the second chapter of new anthology Contemporary Queer Chinese Art, Xiyadie traces in parallel his entrance into Beijing’s burgeoning LGBTQ collective of the first 2000s and his emergence as an artist, first through inclusion in the seminal 2009 exhibition Difference-Gender and then a solo reveal the following year at the Beijing LGBT Centre.

Over 15 chapters by 16 contributors, editors Hongwei Bao, Diyi Mergenthaler and Jamie J. Zhao present the emergence of Homosexual art in China since the mid-1980s. An overall hopeful narrative of forging creative and social spaces is shadowed by how hidden queer art remains in China’s mainstream, increasingly commercialised art scene, and Chinese society’s shrinking cosmos for alternate discourses

LARRY'S LIST - Art Collector Interviews and Art Collector Email Address

It is more than just an LGBTQ-themed museum exhibition— Patrick Sun has built an art collection that focuses on gay Asian art. In 2014, he founded the Sunpride Foundation to raise awareness and earn respect for the LGBTQ group through art.
Patrick Sun has joint with LARRY’S LIST about the precious moment when he brought his father to LGBTQ-themed performance at Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Taipei, the labor collaboration by Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi perform that is hung above his desk, the advantages of collecting gay Asian art, as good as how art can help promoting equal rights for the LGBTQ society in Asia.

 

Collecting

What made you want to start collecting art? What is the main motivation behind your collecting?
I first started collecting some thirty years ago—my first project was on Hollywood Thoroughfare in Hong Kong, an area legendary for curios and antiques. Due to work, I frequently visited that area and became acquainted with shops there, and discovered my interest in traditional Chinese paintings. In 2014, I founded the Sunpride Foundation to raise visibility and earn respect for