Rei Xiao is a US based, Chinese Turkish Artist who recently completed her BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, USA. She undertook a semester at Central St Martin’s in 2022 and holds a BFA from Tufts, 2023.
Rei's work is autobiographical and involves personal stories filled with emotional intensity, symbolism, and sarcastic imagery. She tackles trauma and surreal perception of the conscious and matter through dark humour and whimsical imagery. She uses art as a means of healing and investigating mysteries of her consciousness and interconnectedness between all things and beings.
Painting functions as a channel for her personal history and a psychological process. Anthropomorphized figures often emerge as projections of inner states and alienation, serving as ways to cope with loneliness and uncertainty. Incorporating sardonic and morbid imagery, she reimagines memories and spaces to reclaim agency over trauma. Grounded in lived experience, these narratives unfold across multiple planes of reality.
Rei's process reframes darkness not as an endpoint but as a point of origin instead; a generative site from which new forms, memories, and possibilities arise. Each work contributes to a growing visual lexicon of surreal stories and shifting atmospheric worlds.
In 2022 she was awarded The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and has exhibited her works in multiple group shows including an exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA.