Lei Lei
2021
公园日记
Lei Lei
A boy and his mother sit in a cardboard car in front of painted landscape. This postcard from his childhood is what triggers Chinese artist Lei Lei to go on a journey down the rabbit hole of memory. Put together with his signature style of melancholic collage, time jitters in and out of its usual flow as screenshots, found photos and propaganda images appear in succession as if pulled through an archaic machine to explore how truth is coloured by nostalgia.
A Bright Summer Diary
动物方言
Lei Lei
"What did you dream about and what was your daily life as a teenager?” An older woman recalls her youthful memories in China during the 1970’s while unfolding in front of our eyes the recreation of the modern times from the past. Until one day, the first breathless animal appears, a White horse…
Breathless Animals
Big Hands Oh Big Hands, Let It Be Bigger and Bigger
Lei Lei
This story takes place in a city, in which all of the citizens have very big hands. One child, however, is special. He has tiny hands, and his head full of peculiar thoughts. The boy constantly talks to people about these thoughts, but they dislike his long-windedness and eventually ignore him. He is very lonely. The only he does is talking to the walls.
Big Hands Oh Big Hands, Let It Be Bigger and Bigger
The Universe Cotton
Lei Lei
The story is a narration of a pseudoscience on cotton plantation. The protagonist waters the cotton with music and love, resulting in the greatest harvest that sky is the only way for the cotton to go. Landing from sky, the cotton turns from cloud into candies in kiddy’s hand.
The Universe Cotton
Hand Colored no.2
Thomas Sauvin, Lei Lei
In 2013, Lei Lei and Thomas Sauvin collected numbers of black-and-white photos from Chinese flea markets and imagined that all of them belonged to one fictional Chinese person. Through rendering, collage, and a cyclical process of hand coloring, scanning, and printing, connections among the photos were created.
Hand Colored no.2
Missing One Player
Lei Lei
During a mahjong game, a bad situation occurs. Everyone waits for the last player to show up. The three have no choice but to wait and sit there silently in tears. However, they do believe that the fourth player will come. They look up to the sky waiting for this miracle to happen.
Missing One Player
Weekend
Lei Lei
With Weekend, the artist and Beijing / LA resident Lei Lei not only displays artistic nostalgia, but also the constant quest for certainty regarding history, family and personal identity. His work can be seen as a type of “creative thinking” on the theme, an artistic strategy related to future imagination, and a contradictory position on emotions that cannot be returned to today. As philosopher and art critic Boris Groys pointed out: “Life can be recorded, but it can't be shown.” It is also because of the complexity of this contradiction, and the images that comprise the artist’s works that different images taken at the point of visual transformation and dialectical form between the calm and the energetic are shown, so that “nostalgia” becomes a truly contemporary medium in the practice of image art. Dong Bingfeng
Weekend
HAFF Leader 2016
Lei Lei
During production, I have utilized images from a second-hand book. This book was used to train Chinese youths on how to make quick sketches of human figures in the 80s. I have cut out model photos from the book and placed them in potted landscape, attempting to discover the occasional poetic and dramatic moment from the act of piecing together the work. Moreover, the sound in the leaders is a recording of myself, aged 3. It was the year 1988, when I was practicing the violin. I have combined both pictures and sounds from China in the 80s, and hope making the film seem both humorous and romantic.
HAFF Leader 2016
