Lei Lei | ReelMark

Lei Lei | ReelMark

Filmography

A Bright Summer Diary

A Bright Summer Diary

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.

Weekend

Weekend

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

Ready to play

Ready to play

Short animation about a running girl by Lei Lei

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish

“Our family is special”, says filmmaker Lei Lei’s father Lei Jiaqi. On the audio track of this inventive, poignant essay film he starts to talk about the struggles of his family, amid China’s troubled times of the 1960s. When his own father, Lei Ting, is sent to the countryside, he stays behind with his sister and his ill mother. When Mum passes away, and the system forbids Ting to come back to live with his children, the kids are kept in an orphanage.

This Is Not a Time to Lie

This Is Not a Time to Lie

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.

Breathless Animals

Breathless Animals

"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…

My...MY...

My...MY...

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

Break no.1 & Break no.2.

Break no.1 & Break no.2.

After A Bright Summer Diary (IFFR 2020) and Ningdu (IFFR 2022) we once again welcome Lei Lei to Rotterdam with this compelling tribute to bygone images and memories. As always, the mundane comes alive through a conscientious montage of gorgeous compositions. A two-part quest for what has been lost through time, Break no.1 & Break no.2 fires the imagination.

re-engraved

re-engraved

The fragile materialities of Yangzhou wood engraving and analog film converge in Lei Lei’s fractal portrait of labor and craft. Exploring techniques of light and poetry, wood and celluloid, re-engraved montages demonstrations of expertise with a cacophonous electronic soundtrack and the personal histories of the women whose labor sustains these traditions.

Hu Lulu Hong Longlong Hua Lala

Hu Lulu Hong Longlong Hua Lala

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

Big Hands Oh Big Hands, Let It Be Bigger and Bigger

Big Hands Oh Big Hands, Let It Be Bigger and Bigger

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.

A Gift for You

A Gift for You

No description available

That Day, on the River

That Day, on the River

Searching for the house his father grew up in, director Lei Lei charts the story of a childhood in rural China using a mix of found footage, collage, and animation techniques: a moving account of all the things the father thinks he was not good at.

Hand Colored no.2

Hand Colored no.2

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.

Books on Books

Books on Books

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.

Recycled

Recycled

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

This Is Love

This Is Love

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?

I Don't Like The Comics You Drew

I Don't Like The Comics You Drew

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

Missing One Player

Missing One Player

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.

Magic Cube and Ping-Pong

Magic Cube and Ping-Pong

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