In Conversation: Hera Chan and Rosario Güiraldes

Join The Drawing Center’s Associate Curator Rosario Güiraldes and Tate's Adjunct Curator of Greater China Hera Chan for a conversation presented in conjunction with the exhibition Xiyadie: Queer Cut Utopias. Xiyadie is the first known Chinese paper-cut artist to publicly depart from the Chinese folk-art context as well as the only paper-cutting artist in mainland China to engage with queer themes. Since the 1980s, he has deployed traditional techniques to articulate, destigmatize, and celebrate queerness. Güiraldes and Chan will discuss the evolution of Xiyadie’s personal and artistic expression within the context of China, and his unique fusion of traditional folk forms and iconography with narratives from his personal life.

Hera Chan is a curator and writer based in Amsterdam by way of Hong Kong, and a longtime friend and collaborator of Xiyadie. She is Adjunct Curator of Greater China, Supported by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation, at Tate. Her work engages with performative infrastructures such as elections—as co-producer of KomBIJ1 TV, a political talk show aired in the Netherlands the occupied Dutch Antilles leading up to the Dutch parliamentary elections of 2021, pageantry—as co-founder and curator of platform Miss Ruthless International in Hong Kong, and diasporic networks—as founding director of para-institution Atelier Céladon in Montreal. She was a grantee of The Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant in 2022 with a focus on the militant image after the uprisings of the Milk Tea Alliance between 2019 and 2021.

Rosario Güiraldes is Associate Curator at The Drawing Center