In Sensual Paper Cut-Outs, Xiyadie Carves Narratives of Queer Pleasure

Sinuous negative spaces lead to curvaceous slits and transform into abundant carnality in Xiyadie’s paper cuts, painted with Chinese pigments. Entangled through their limbs and linked by their genitals, the bodies depicted inhabit a rhythm conducted by the artist’s own movement of the scissor through the sheet. This tactile process—the smooth gliding of the shearing tool to bear gentle incisions on paper—mirrors the sensuality of the images of Xiyadie’s resulting cut-outs. The Chinese artist’s solo exhibition “Queer Cut Utopias,” at the Drawing Center in New York, is an invitation into his insistently kinky mind, with its meticulous visual lexicon.

Organized by the institution’s former associate curator Rosario Güiraldes, Xiyadie’s first exhibition in the U.S. maneuvers through the 60-year-old artist’s daydreams, fantasies, and musings, particularly significant given his personal life, as a gay man who is married to a woman and a father of two. He learned paper-cutting while growing up in the northern province of Shaanxi, where the practice was deemed a feminine craft. The traces from his daytime job as a farmer are evident in the tactile precision and manual labor of his works, almost all of which he created behind closed doors. After studying at Special Arts and Crafts School in Heyang County, he only found the opportunity to show his works at the Beijing LGBT Center in 2010, after which he participated in several group exhibitions in Asia and Europe.

Xiyadie’s offering is universally alluring, sensuously technical, and disarmingly familiar. Men with otherworldly features engage with bacchanal pleasures—they seem deliriously aroused by the reality of the very moment, yet gloriously detached from the outside world. They penetrate one another, devour each others’ genitals, and climax with operatic flamboyance. They defy the innate silence of works on paper, creating an almost audible fervor, and with brutal gentleness, they claim beauty as their own.

Mostly in square format, each work captures a flat scenery of carnal escapade framed by breathtaking architectural and natural vistas. With an homage to Asian, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern miniature traditions, the artist renders his juxtapositions flat, defying perspective. A temple and a body reach the same heights, for example, and the moon is as big as a man’s head.

Kaiyang (2021), in particular, is a tour de force, recalling the orderly chaos of Picasso’s Guernica, and the eruptive psychosexual ethos of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. An army of men are depicted in a lustful procession, bodies intertwined tightly like a sailor’s knot, yet with the characteristic breeziness of Xiyadie’s cut-out style. They perform devotion to gratification, a will to please and be pleased amid the artist’s backgrounds full of amusing detail.

In these works, nature seems to be on the men’s side, too: Lush trees blossom with bulging flowers, plants crawl around their pleasure-fueled encounters, and even the moon eyes them with envy. Subjects also wear floral headpieces, and bouquets of roses and ornate motifs grow out of their nude bodies. These men appear to be the guardians of a delightful land where pleasure is the principle and sex the ritual. For instance, Flowerpot (1991) is a scene of anal sex whose wide-eyed players gaze into one another with beastly curiosity. From their contorted physiques stem a gush of flora, bulky flowers float above maze-like branches in which birds hide to watch the lovers.

For Xiyadie, there is ritual in the process, the prayer-like, repetitive, perhaps transcendental journey of slicing the soft surface. The hand may feel exhausted or the imagination drained, but the artist’s balancing of manual effort with fantasy attempts to defy these physical constraints. Each cut receives its love and care, bending smoothly to transform into a buttock, an ear, testicles, or a flower. The curved tip of a temple’s roof is the result of an attentive move, as are the tiny chips that convey two lovers’ nipples.

Pastel hues vividly dress each mise-en-scène, lending the skin a youthful sheen. Pinks color the wide open roses, as well as the pointy nipples; yellow is in the men’s hair, but also repeats in decorative lion-head motifs. Green is found throughout, from plants that creep across the figures to their penises and eyebrows. When two lips kiss, their locked mouths are dipped in cherry red. Conversely, a group of smaller-scale monochromic cut-outs use only red or black, which yield rather more hallucinatory silhouettes: Circular bodies in the midst of fellatio resemble entangled flowers amid towering trees.