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Star Gallery
798 Arts District, B10, 2 Jiuxianqiao Road,
Chaoyang District,
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...Coming Soon by Lei Lei
by Star Gallery
Location: Star Gallery
Date: 15 Feb - 14 Mar 2014

…Coming Soon, Lei Lei’s first solo exhibition is held at Star Gallery. The animation film and the installation works are from his residency project in the MacDowell Colony in the United States in 2013, while the inspiration comes from Lei Lei’s family memories:

 “In 2010 I read an article The Changes of My Family written by my father on the magazine Old Photos. Based on family memories, the article depicts the stories of my family - joys and sorrows, separations and reunions, from the initial days of PRC to 1980s. The article caught my interest. I was amazed by those dramatic oral histories, and had a better understanding of my families. When I met them again, I felt there was a golden aura covering them. Therefore I wish to tell my family stories and history through animation, and to complete the project along with my father and grandfather.”

The music in the animation is an excerpt of , a jinghu performance by Lei Lei’s grandfather Lei Ting, recorded in the summer of 2011. The background voices are from the interview with him in 2011, My grandfather continuously talks in dialect about the time when my grandmother died of illness in 1955, adding details (such as thoughts and emotions at that time) to my father's original article, and thus making the story more vivid.

The old photos and artistic calligraphy are from Lei Lei’s father’s drawings on paper from 2010 to 2014 in Nanchang, Jiangxi. “When he was young, my father used to make illustrations and designs for TVs and newspapers, which impressed me a lot. Therefore during the making of , my father redrew the family photos in the form of black and white decorative drawings, and recorded the process frame by frame with camera. The process in the animation is like old films gradually developed in the darkroom, and the memories slowly emerged.

The clay elements in the animation film are hand made by Lei Lei from 2012 to 2014 in Quebec, Canada and Peterborough, USA. Since Lei Lei didn’t experience that history among the three generations, though he did live for a while in Ningdu at the age of seven, he had no idea what Ningdu County was like in 1959, neither in the sense of time, nor in space. He definitely could not reproduce the history with memories, narrative or drawings, like his father and grandfather did.  All he could do is “making up of history”.

His “making up of history” contains double meanings. On one hand in the animation, the mountains and water, characters and objects are all made with clay by hand, with Lei Lei’s visible fingerprints. On the other hand, Lei Lei added in some mythological elements into his grandfather’s stories. For example, his colleague Mr. Guo became Earth God in the animation, and the county officers were living in the temple, which of course was not the fact. Lei Lei believes that sometimes it is hard to tell myths from history, and the myths might be more real.

The show has not only shown Lei Lei’s work, but also works on paper from his father and grandfather in the form of documentary, plus materials used in the creation of his animation film. 

*image(left)
courtesy of Star Gallery 

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