Lei Lei

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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.

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"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…

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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

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Dave draws the first page of his comic book and excitedly shows it to his friend Lei Lei. Lei Lei is not impressed.

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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.

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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.

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The cutout patterns are from my father's book, Book Cover Collection in the West, which was published in 1988, when Chinese leaders launched their great "Reform" and "Opening Up" to embrace the world. Many leading concepts of book cover design were introduced in this book, which has had an eye-opening influence on the younger generation of Chinese designers since.

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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.

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With animation from Lei Lei and beatboxing from Eloi Dequeker, this is the story of "guy with a hat" as he heads to the cinema in the supercar.

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The young Chinese animator also known as “Ray” Lei crafts a hallucinatory short that follows a doe-eyed protagonist on a quest through an imagined world.

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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.

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An exhaustively created moving image mural of Beijing and her inhabitants, painstakingly extracted from an archive of half a million 35mm negatives.

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A guy suddenly finds himself naked. Where are his clothes!?

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One day, a heavy rain floods a small, peaceful village. A brave child swims to the universe to save the day.

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After a long flight, a young man is greeted lovingly by his girlfriend. As they embrace, the man spots a hole in the woman’s sock. Can their love survive this?

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Love – and ping pong - can be liberating in a world of sameness.

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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.

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A happy planet of pear people is invaded by some mean reverse pear head aliens. A film about peace, tolerance and forgiveness. Drawn with pens on exercise books.

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Animated film by Lei Lei.

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