Rei Xiao
Rei Xiao is a Chinese-Turkish visual artist born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, and came to the US to study fine arts. She received her bachelor of fine arts degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. She has been exhibiting her works since the age of 17 internationally. She had her first solo show through Mamut Art Project in 2019 in Istanbul; and participated in group exhibitions in New York, London and Boston. Her work was featured in a juried exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, "SMFA x MFA: Archive and Autobiography" in 2022, and the same year, she received the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant. Her most recent group show “Katharsis: The share of the silent” was in Istanbul at March Art Project in 2024. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, and has been working as a painter and a tattoo artist.
Her work is autobiographical and merges dreamscapes with lived experience through painting. She encapsulates several details or cryptic messages suggesting a narrative outside the frame with allegories. Through whimsical and morbid imagery, she navigates the tension between immersion in trauma and the outward journey of expanding the lexicon of her consciousness. Her Chinese-Turkish heritage is the root of her interest in depicting hybridity and in-betweenness while projecting her inner world onto the vessels of objects and animals. Using this imagery, she depicts stories that are grounded in reality but evolve into other realms.
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