NEW YORK, NY.- Bortolami will present a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Xiyadie, marking the first gallery show in New York of his hand-cut and dyed paper works. This presentation follows his debut American exhibit at the Drawing Center co-curated by Rosario Güiraldes and Hera Chan in 2023. Since his premiere in New York, Xiyadie’s work has been presented at the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Xiyadie–meaning Siberian butterfly–began working under this pseudonym in the 1990s, upon his move to Beijing as a migrant worker from Weinan, in the Northwest of China. The chosen name denotes a twinned freedom and resilience, as the unbounded and delicate creature is primed to survive the harshest of climates. Prior to his relocation, and since the 1980s, Xiyadie has continued the oft-feminized domestic métier of papercuts, freely snipped and hand-dyed, a tradition passed down from his mother. Like his self-appointed moniker, the cutouts are at once fragile, produced from gauze-like rice paper, while deftly articulate–depicting intricate scenes of queer desire, fantasy, and reality through vivid and precisely incised tableaus.

Traditionally hung on the glass panes of homes, the web-like designs of these craftworks insist on a fluid boundary, projecting scenes between and within domestic and public spaces as a dance of light and shadow. An ancient custom inviting fortune and prosperity harkening as far back as 3 BCE, Chinese papercutting, under Xiyadie’s intricate incisions, is updated to describe the private and public exploration of gay life. His vignettes are often descriptions of the porous threshold between the home, where the artist lives openly with his wife and two children, and public sites of cruising relegated to the crevices of civil spaces. The Wall in the titular piece from the 2000s is both border and mirror, separating and reflecting the artist and his split self. Within a shared and cramped scene, an avatar for the artist reaches a hand from within a domestic realm towards his crouching and segregated other found in a garden’s enclosure. The fingers of the former’s hand are caught in a state metamorphosis, transfiguring into a fleet of birds, as the latter figure, pronounces and receives a lattice of flora.

Central to Xiyadie’s work is the act of re-inscribing a traditional medium with symbolism profoundly shaped by the artist’s personal milieu. Doors, animals, flora, and ornamental forms become codified metaphors: bittersweet markers of thresholds crossed, pressures endured, and pleasures reclaimed. In this way, his practice both extends and disrupts the lineage of Chinese folk papercutting, transforming a communal language of celebration into one of subversion, self- expression, and survival. Figures entwined with flowers, animals, and architecture conjure tender scenes that slip between fantasy and lived experience, opening spaces for queer intimacy, play, and longing. These utopian scenes exist outside of the traditional status quo, proposing alternative worlds where desire and defiance can flourish, unbound by social censorship and constraint.

At once playful and transgressive, the artist’s mises-en-scène literalizes the desired/desiring male body as both a subject and site of tension. Figures in the throes of homoerotic encounter—erect, intertwined, unflinchingly explicit— render queer sex with a candor rarely afforded and recognized by the surrounding cultural backdrop. In these compositions, the threshold between secrecy and spectacle is collapsed, whereby private acts are thrust into public circulation. Within the grander tapestry of state building, Xiyadie’s commitment to explicit depiction bears the double weight of censorship: imagery that persists, and at times elicits delight, due to its innate concealment and defiant exhibition. His artistic oeuvre, by spreading across a shared, and now international, network of spectatorship, exceeds its erasure and accrues new life through collective viewership and risk. Xiyadie’s paper cutouts ask what can and cannot be shown, what can and cannot be said, while the artist himself perpetuates the acts and discourse under contestation.

Xiyadie (b. 1963, Shaanxi, China) is a self-taught traditional Chinese papercut artist. The artist presented his work in the Main Exhibition of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024), as well as the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana, 2019) and the 12th Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, 2018). His solo exhibitions include Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong, 2024), The Drawing Center (New York, 2023), Flazh!Alley Art Studio (Los Angeles, 2012), and the Beijing LGBT Center (Beijing, 2010). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo, 2024), Macalline Center of Art (Beijing, 2024), ICA NYU Shanghai (Shanghai, 2023), Kunsthal Gent (Ghent, 2023), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2022), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2022), Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, 2020), Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (Bangkok, 2019), Taipei MOCA (Taipei, 2019), and the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Stockholm, 2012). Xiyadie is a member of the China Society for the Study of Folk Literature and Art and the Shaanxi Society for the Study of Folk Literature and Art.