Metamorphosis of a Butterfly: Neoliberal Subjectivation and Queer Autonomy in Xiyadie’s Papercutting Art

Celebrated as ‘China’s Tom of Finland’ (Fan 2018), Xiyadie (Figure 1) is probably one of the best-known queer artists living in China today. He uses the traditional Chinese handcraft of papercutting to express homoerotic themes and personal feelings. His works often departs from a metropolitan gay experience to explore gay people’s lives in rural China (Rofel in Zonkel 2012). His identity as a gay man from rural China and his method of using the Chinese folk art of papercutting for queer artistic expression make him a unique figure in contemporary Chinese art. As the first academic article on the artist and his artworks, this article examines Xiyadie’s transformation of identity in life and the representation of gay identity in his papercutting art. In doing so, I wish to delineate modes of subjectivation under transnational market forces and explore possible ways of desubjectivation and artist autonomy in neoliberal capitalism.

. I ask what forms and possibilities of subjectivation and de-subjectivation are possible in contemporary society in the context of neoliberalism, a global art market, and a transnational LGBTQ Movement. I also query how Xiyadie deals with all these social forces beyond his control.
Looking at Xiyadie's life story and career trajectory, one cannot help but notice several key moments when his life took dramatic twists and turns: (1) the moment when his artistic talent was recognized by a folklore expert and Xiyadie subsequently became a folk artist; (2) the moment when he was encouraged by Sha Qing and Ji Dan, two independent documentary filmmakers, to use papercutting as a form of self-expression; (3) the moment he was recognized as a 'queer artist' at the Beijing LGBT Centre, thus signalling the start of his career as an international queer artist. All these moments signalled dramatic transformations of Xiyadie's identity; they also testified the making and remaking of subjectivities in a postsocialist, neoliberal and transnational context, in which human life ceases to be zoe (Agamben 1998), or natural life, and creativity becomes increasingly reified and commodified in identity politics and an international art market.
When Xiyadie was working for an art and craft shop in Shaanxi, he was introduced to Professor Shi, a Chinese folklore expert, who discovered Xiyadie's talent. According to Professor Shi, Xiyadie did not merely follow the tradition by making copies of traditional patterns, but created new themes and contents using papercutting as a medium, and this quality distinguished a creative artist from an ordinary craftsperson (SexybeijingTV 2012). In a Sexy Beijing video interview, Professor Shi made no mention of Xiyadie's homoerotic artworks, partly because this was considered an embarrassing topic, and partly because Xiyadie was too reluctant to show the teacher his homoerotic artworks. With Professor Shi's help, Xiyadie gained recognition from the local government as a folk artist producing artworks worthy of state preservation and subsequently received a modest amount of artist subsidy every month. He also became a member of the China Society for the Study of Folk Literature and Art, as well as the Shaanxi Society for the Study of Folk Literature and Art. In this way, he turned from an ordinary farmer possessing an unusual skill to a folk artist; he also became a subject of the nation state and its history by producing artworks of national and historical value. Creativity and skills ceased to be individual properties; they became properties of the state. In Giorgio Agamben's (1998)  The filmmaker couple encouraged Xiyadie to continue with his artistic creation and to pursue artistic freedom. After seeing Xiyadie's queer-themed artworks and realising Xiyadie's sexual identity, they even encouraged Xiyadie to make more of such works and with a stronger sense of individual style. After seeing some of his works, 'Sha Qing was very excited and kept on saying "wonderful". He pointed at the big penis in an artwork and said: "this is great! Make it bigger".' (Guo 2016).
Despite the official recognition of his papercutting works as 'folk art' and the gaining of artistic agency and autonomy inspired by the two filmmakers, Xiyadie artworks would not have become 'queer art' and gained an international reputation without the recognition of his gay identity by the transnational LGBTQ Movement. The Beijing LGBT Centre, a Beijingbased LGBTQ non-governmental organization played a crucial role in the process. In 2005, Xiyadie went to Beijing and became one of China's hundreds of millions of migrant workers.
Living in China's capital city and working on odd jobs did not make Xiyadie financially better off, but it offered him unprecedented freedom as a gay man. He soon found himself in Dongdan Park, one of China's biggest public cruising venues, where he met his current boyfriend. During a visit to the Beijing LGBT Centre for a voluntary HIV/AIDS screening test, he showed a community centre volunteer some pictures of his papercutting. 'Guang [the community centre social worker] repeated three times: my God. We have finally had the opportunity to see a living Chinese queer artist in our own times!' (Guo 2016). This dramatic moment marked the formal recognition of Xiyadie as a 'living Chinese queer artist', and his life took a dramatic turn from then on. The Beijing LGBT Centre not only included his works in Difference-Gender, China's first queer art exhibition. They also introduced him to art curators from all over the world, including Jan Montoya, creative director of the Long Beach LGBT Centre, who subsequently introduced Xiyadie's work to the art gallery Flazh!Alley Studio in New York (Sebag-Montefiore 2012). Xiyadie's life has begun as a 'Chinese queer artist' in the international art market and has continued ever since.
Faced with his newly acquired fame as a Chinese queer artist, Xiyadie was extremely modest: 'I never thought about becoming an artist. Some people saw my work and then called me one.
I'm only a farmer, belonging to my yellow soil land.' (Xiyadie in Harrity 2012). This modesty seemed to have increased his charm as an authentic and unpretentious artistic genius. American gay magazine Advocate described his artwork as carrying a sense of 'sweet innocence' (Harrity 2012). The Beijing-based magazine Gayspot described Xiyadie's entry into the international art scene in an exaggerated and even slightly patronising tone: 'What is remarkable about him is that he does not know, nor does he ever need to know, that his papercutting works can be exhibited and even sold for money' (Guo 2016). The image of an unsophisticated indigenous Chinese queer artist with childlike innocence and whose works are untainted by consumerism and capitalist modernity have emerged in these journalistic accounts.
Xiyadie learned to be gay by learning to use the popular jargons from national and transnational LGBTQ activist discourses. In an interview, he described his past experience as a homosexual in a small town: 'I had never heard of it [homosexuality] in my hometown.
Sometimes I thought I was a liumang/hoodlum. Only after coming to Beijing did I see that there are so many of us.' (Xiyadie in SexybeijingTV 2012). 2 In this narrative, homosexuality either did not have a name (through the use of euphemisms such as 'it' or 'so many of us') or carried a criminalized and pathologized connotation ('liumang/hoodlum'). After he was accepted by the queer communities in Beijing, Xiyadie changed his choice of words: 'Tongxinglian/Homosexual is a term used to describe a pathology. You should have used the term tongzhi/comrade. It expresses equality.' and 'If I had known I was gay, I wouldn't have got married' (Xiyadie in SexybeijingTV 2012). 3 He also learned to use English terms such as LGBT and gay, expressing the wish that he would like to visit the 'gay qu' (gay district) in Los Angeles.
Liumang/hoodlum, tongxinglian/homosexual, tongzhi/comrade and gay: these are not simply different words to refer to sexual minorities; they are different types of sexual subjectivities constructed in multiple discourses and under various governing regimes (Bao 2018: 61). The rejection of stigmatized identity labels such as liumang/hoodlum and tongxinglian/homosexual and the embrace of the tongzhi/comrade and gay identities signals Xiyadie's changing understandings of sexual and social identities: from an illegitimate sexual subject without a proper name to a nationally and transnationally recognized sexual citizenship. This transformation also has class connotations: the transition from liumang/hoodlum and tongxinglian/homosexual to tongzhi/comrade and gay is characterized by upward social mobility, as the latter terms are usually used by middle-class citizens in China's increasingly commercialized and homonormative LGBTQ movement to refer to themselves.
The 'discovery' of a Chinese queer artist was situated at a critical historical juncture, when China's LGBTQ Movement was in full bloom after the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1997 and its depathologization in 2011 (Bao 2018: 73). This coincided with a relatively relaxed political atmosphere since China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the flooding of HIV/AIDS-related international funding into China, which lent support to mushrooming LGBTQ grassroots organizations and social movements. The fast developing LGBTQ Movement in China increasingly called for more indigenous queer representations and intersectional modes of queer politics. Papercutting as a traditional Chinese art form gave the queer communities a sense of indigeneity; and a gay artist from a rural and migrant working-class background also offered the community a much-needed example of intersectional queer diversity. Xiyadie could thus be introduced as an 'indigenous Chinese queer artist' to the outside world and to showcase that queer, art and queer art can be rural, working-class, and Chinese too.
In an international context, Xiyadie has increasingly been labelled a Chinese queer artist representing China's 'suffering' queer communities. His name 'Siberian Butterfly' has often been invoked in journalist writings to connotate an individual's desire for freedom under a repressive political regime. During his exhibition in United States, an American journalist reported: 'in China, Xiyadie is a closeted artist. So he came to America to be "out"' (Zonkel 2012). BBC even commented on Xiyadie's works as 'revealing the troubled psyche of China's homosexual community' (Sui 2017). Willingly or unwillingly, Xiyadie and his artworks have been endowed with a specific meaning of 'Chineseness'; they participate in shaping a post-Cold War popular narrative of freedom and repression. Sexuality and gay identity stand at the centre of such a narrative.

Documenting Queer Lives on Paper and with Scissors
When Xiyadie's works were first exhibited at Difference-Gender, China's first queer art exhibition organized by the Beijing LGBT Center in 2009, the exhibition was shut down by the authorities on the charge of obscenity and lack of official approval. All but Xiyadie's works were confiscated by the police. Without noticing the homoerotic themes in Xiyadie's works, a policeman even encouraged the use of papercutting as a means of artistic expression (Guo 2016). This anecdote manifested Chinese authorities' conservative attitude toward homosexuality and art; it also opened up discussions about the use of traditional art forms to explore transgressive themes and topics.
On a quick glance, many of Xiyadie's papercutting works may not differ much from traditional papercutting practiced in rural China. He often cuts patterns out of red banner paper, using traditional motifs such as flowers and animals that symbolize happiness and prosperity ( Figure 3). On a closer look, one can see more details emerging from the abstract lines and shapes; one could even be shocked at the audacity of these works: they are often highly graphic images that portray explicit sex and same-sex intimacies between men. In Figure 3, a man is sitting on a chair performing fellatio to himself in the centre of the frame.
But this detail can easily escape from a viewer's attention, as the man is surrounded by traditional papercutting motifs such as flowers, a bird and even a cat. The traditional motifs, as well as the colour scheme, all contribute to the obscuring of the central message. Xiyadie does not deliberately do so to confuse the viewers. The implicit appearance of his queer representation is often attributed to the abstract nature of the papercutting as an artistic language, which relies solely on abstract lines and shapes and do not usually offer a realistic rendition of people and objects being represented. It often takes a trained eye to interpret these abstract visual codes. The fact that these homoerotic images survived the police raid of the Difference-Gender exhibition served as a good example of the specificity of the artistic language. Because of this, together with the legitimacy of papercutting as an officially recognized and widely accepted folk art form in China, the police only noticed the form but missed the content of Xiyadie's works. Indeed, while the form of papercutting is important, and people often take it for granted that the content should be in line with the form and thus be conventional, one needs to pay close attention to the content of Xiyadie's works. Form and content constitute a dynamic unity in Xiyadie's papercutting. Most of Xiyadie's recent work is cut out of the soft, thin and fine-textured Xuan paper (or rice paper) instead of the thick and hard-textured type of banner paper. This gives him an opportunity to dye the images and their backgrounds. Xiyadie uses water colour made of Chinese pigments, often used for decorating steam buns in rural Shaanxi, to dye the pictures.
He frequently uses blue or black as the background colour, together with a combination of red, yellow, blue and green as primary colours of his works. He described the cutting and dying process as follows: The paper is a form of traditional rice paper, Xuan paper, which feels a bit like cloth. It's very absorbent and easy to flatten, but because it's so thin, you have to cut several papers at the same time, so they are done in editions. I ink them all at once, from the top, but sometimes the colour is not as vibrant at the bottom, so I have to remove the layers and add more colour, which can take a lot of time. The large ones take about a month or more just to cut. Though I cut all of the works free form, I often make a composition first as a small paper-cut and use it as a model for making a larger one. (Xiyadie in Cordray 2018) This procedure bears striking resemblances to the 'print and dye' (yinran) technique used in the traditional cottage textile industry in rural China, something that Xiyadie may be familiar with through his life experiences in Northwest China's countryside. It also draws our attention to the materiality of paper and dye: both materials are highly indigenous and locally available in rural Shaanxi. Despite the hard work and the long time it takes to complete a piece of work, Xiyadie's account shows the care he takes and the passion he cherishes for the creative process. Through these materialized and embodied artistic practices, Xiyadie situates himself in the long genealogy of artisans and craftsmen in rural China and places his works in dialogues with traditional forms of papercutting in history. His artworks thus carry with themselves a sense of 'aura' (Benjamin 1968), often associated with an unproducible process of creative practice and an un-reified form of human labour.
Xiyadie draws on a multiplicity of traditional themes from Chinese painting and papercutting, including flowers and birds, double happiness, lanterns and flower vases (Fig 4). They all display various degrees of symmetry, as papercutting artists usually work with folded paper.
But Xiyadie often break the symmetry by giving each side some variations. The butterfly is a common theme in Xiyadie's traditional papercutting ( Figure 5). Given Xiyadie's artist name is 'Siberian Butterfly' and his wish to pursue freedom like a butterfly, this is hardly surprising. What is common to these traditional themes and motifs is that Xiyadie invariably 'queers' them: that is, placing homoerotic experience at the centre of the images. Men kiss and have sex with each other unabashedly in the midst of flowers, animals and utensils. This seems to suggest that homoeroticism can be compatible with Chinese tradition, in contrary to the common perception that homosexuality in China is a Western import. As Xiyadie 'queers' the Chinese tradition, he also indigenizes homoeroticism.  them. This manifests the unity between human and nature and conveys the belief that samesex desire is also part of nature and is therefore perfectly normal. In Flowerpot (Figure 7), penetrating and penetrated human bodies grow out of a flowerpot. Drawing on Daoism, a folk religion deeply rooted in Chinese society and belief systems, Xiyadie interprets sex and sexuality not as individualistic desires and identities that can reveal the truth about a person, but as ubiquitous vital forces which fill the entire cosmos. In doing so, he does not privilege human beings over animals or plants. In his universe, everything consists of vital energy, and they exchange energies with one another, thus making the world a vital one. The life force that Xiyadie depicts thus resembles qi in the Daoist philosophy or élan vital in Henri Bergson's (1911) vitalism. They share and inspire an anti-identitarian and antianthropocentric way of thinking.      Xiyadie met his first boyfriend, a train attendant, on a train to Xi'an (Li 2018). This romantic encounter is documented in his work Train (Figure 12). We know the location of their encounter because of the locomotive, the driver, the carriages, the wheels, the railway tracks, and even a train company logo dotted around the picture. We can also learn about the time of their encounter: the two men probably met between the Year of the Tiger (top left) and the Year of the Rabbit (bottom right). Xiyadie uses a large number of symbols in his works, many of which only make sense when one is familiar with his life story, as many of these works are highly autobiographical.     (Rofel 2007: 103-106). As mentioned earlier, the homosexual subjects cruising in public spaces are in fact different sexual subjects from the middle-class 'gay' or 'queer' identified people. Xiyadie's artworks can be seen as social critiques, addressing directly the brutal inequalities and injustices in a society that puts 'harmony' at the centre of its political ideology.

Sexuality and Class: A Postsocialist Allegory of Modernity
While the gay community and the international art market mostly see Xiyadie as a queer artist representing gay identities and queer desires in contemporary China, his other works are often neglected, largely because they do not carry homoerotic themes. Some of these works deploy a socialist realistic approach. They reveal the inequalities and injustices in contemporary Chinese society, as well as harsh realities of everyday life in China for poor and socially marginalized people. Indeed, a lot of his homoerotic-themed artworks also carry with them a distinct 'class' sensibility; they portray the lives of the rural, migrant and urban poor, or 'homosexuals' (tongxinglian), living on the fringes of Chinese society. Most of them struggle for a living and have to use public cruising grounds to find sex partners. These queer representations distinguish themselves from the 'queer mainstream' in urban China, which often feature well-educated and cosmopolitan gay and lesbian subjects who can afford the luxury of queer commercial public spaces (such as gay bars and clubs) and private spaces (such as a city flat with a great degree of freedom and privacy). Sexuality in a neoliberalising China thus should be examined in conjunction with class, as gay or queer is often used to denote identities and desires with class distinctions, demarcate social classes and define legitimate and illegitimate desires (Bao 2018: 61). Unfortunately, Xiyadie's works of social critique have not received much critical attention to date: the queer communities and the international art market seem more interested in celebrating the emergence of a Chinese queer artist, whose creative energies and potentials are believed to have been unleashed by his gay identity and a capitalistic art market. After all, words such as class, exploitation and capitalism hold little appeal in a highly commercialized art market and a global 'pink economy' in a post-Cold War world that has recently witnessed the 'end of history' (Fukuyama 1992) and the ultimate triumph of neoliberal values.
It is necessary to recognize the connection between sexuality and class in transnational neoliberal capitalism in order to understand the rise of a Chinese queer artist and his works.
While people celebrate Xiyadie's creativity, let us not forget the fact that papercutting has a long history, and is deeply rooted in folk and socialist traditions in China's history. Let us also remember the fact that Xiyadie has been doing papercutting for the last few decades, and it is only until very recently that he was labelled as a 'Chinese queer artist' and his artworks began to receive international attention. The cruising 'homosexual' subjects in Xiyadie's papercutting works are often seen by some as orientalized and sexualized spectacles and by others as documents of a bygone community history. For Xiyadie and many other queer people from underprivileged backgrounds, they are realistic depictions of their ordinary lives, as they have to struggle between their family responsibilities and personal desires, as they have to cruise in public spaces because they do not have access to queer private and commercial spaces, and as they continue to be faced with different forms of discrimination: as sexual minorities, migrant workers, and people coming from rural, migrant and urban poor backgrounds. In this sense, Xiyadie's papercutting works should be seen as an allegory for a neoliberal China, when class is eclipsed by sexuality, when working-class history is replaced by middle-class identity narratives, and when different forms of social inequality and injustice are concealed by an obsession with identity politics and individual desires. In this sense, we should look at Xiyadie's homoerotic images from the perspectives of socialist realism and social expose, with the aim of rethinking and unsettling the neoliberal status quo.

Becoming Butterfly: Locating Artist Agency and Autonomy
Although increasingly recognized as an artist, Xiyadie often rejects such a label himself: 'I never thought about becoming an artist. Some people saw my work and then called me one.
I'm only a farmer, belonging to my yellow soil land.' (Xiyadie in Harrity 2012) He also rejects political and commercial interpretations of his works. He often claims that he does not produce artworks to help gay activism; nor does he do it to make money. He cuts paper simply as individual expression (Jao 2012; Sebag-Montefiore 2012). The following interview is a good example to show his apolitical stance: I don't care about whether it is private or public ... I do these things for myself … I lived in Beijing for eight years, I don't have a television or a radio. I don't know what's going on outside with the politicians. I just do my artwork … I never complain about the government because I don't have experience with the government." (Ávila 2012) While it is possible that he made the above statements to avoid politicising his artworks and getting himself into unnecessary trouble, his words can also be read as an implicit critique that 'doing politics' is often a middle-class privilege and that poor people struggling for livelihood often do not have the luxury of engaging with political debates in a public sphere.
It would, however, be naïve to think of Xiyadie's works as completely apolitical: desires and their public expression are always politically sensitive issues and often subject to state control and intervention. In a country where explicit expression of homoeroticism and gay rights is limited, making queer-themed artworks has significant political implications. At the international art market, Xiyadie is framed as a 'Chinese queer artist', and his life has been irrevocably entangled in global geopolitics in a post-Cold War world order. In this sense, even though Xiyadie may be unaware of these political implications, his life and artworks have been unequivocally politicized, and are intrinsically political. Perhaps we should not dismiss Xiyadie's lack of political consciousness as 'false consciousness' (Marx and Engels 1974). After all, his life and feelings are no less real than those of others, such as Ai Weiwei, whose life and artworks cannot help but be overtly political. After all, they are two different types of artists living in their respective worlds. And furthermore, art does not always have to be over-political or politicized; there can be contingent moments of revealing and concealing in terms of politics. An artist can probably locate a certain degree of agency and autonomy in the process of artistic engagement. In such a process, they may temporarily lose themselves and their lives may escape domesticity, mundanity, drudgery and ideological control. Xiyadie emphasized the role of imagination in his artistic creation processes: 'To do papercutting, I need to have a lot of imagination. Through my imagination, I am the creator; I'm the king.' (Ávila 2012) The analogy between a creator and a king shows a great deal of self-confidence and autonomous freedom. It also bespeaks the potential of artist agency and autonomy. In a world where individuals often have little control over their own lives, let alone over national and international politics, agency and autonomy, however limited, is what ordinary people need for survival. Through imagination, Xiyadie conjures up a 'queer autonomous space' (Brown 2007) and a longing for utopia. Oscar Wilde's (1891) famous quote on utopia is relevant here: 'A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at'.
Refuting the 'anti-social' turn and the 'no future ' (e.g. Edelman 2004)  Like the ease with which a master chef carves an ox described in ancient Chinese philosophy (Chuang Tzu n.d.), Xiyadie has also gained remarkable dexterity with paper and scissors. 4 The process of papercutting becomes an access to personal autonomy and emancipation from worldly constraints. Probably we should think of the papercutting process not as how Xiyadie the human subject engages with the objects of scissors and paper, but as how Xiyadie the human subject interacts with other agents such as materials (including scissors, paper and dying colours) and technologies (which include designing, cutting and dyeing colours). This