Xie Lei China, 1983

Xie Lei, born in Huainan, Anhui province, China, lives and works in Paris since 2006. After graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he came to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and then received his PhD (practice-based) in visual arts in 2016 from École normal supérieure and Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris.

In Xie Lei’s paintings, animals and plants are personified and seem to acquire a personality of their own, while human characters are intimately incorporated in their environment, forming one with nature. While these environments are depicted by conventional signs, Xie Lei often eschews delineating ground from sky, proximity from depth and foreground from background, thereby deliberately confusing the viewer’s sense of time and space and disseminating a sense of ethereality into paintings that look no more like windows into a new world but as symbolist talismans facing the viewer.

Xie Lei’s work is included in public and private collections, such as Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC VAL) and Burger Collection. He has been exhibited widely in France, Switzerland and China. Notable solo exhibitions were staged at Yishu 8 in Beijing, Galerie Anne de Villepoix Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts Paris, Z Gallery Arts Vancouver. Significant group shows such as “Persona Grata” in MAC VAL and Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris; “How To See [What Isn’t There]”, Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany; “Collection David H. Brolliet – Geneva”, Fondation Fernet-Branca, Saint-Louis; “Memo II” at White Space, Beijing and “Ligne de Chance,” Fondation Ricard, Paris.