29 years old, CHINESE
2013: Annecy Festival
2013: Grand Prix Shorts - Non Narrative
2010: Best Narrative Short presso Ottawa International Animation Festival
My wheel is a hand-painted cartoon that represents the cosmic circle, the history of the world.
It's easy and simple to understand even for a child but, at the same time, it contains the sense of our past as well as the memory of human beings.
Lei Lei is a Chinese animation artist and graphic designer whose film, "This is Love" won 2010 Best Narrative Short at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
In 2013, his film "Recycled" was selected by Annecy festival and was the Winner for Grand Prix shorts - non-narrative at the Holland International Animation Film Festival.
Only 28 years old, Lei Lei founded the animation group "Raydesign Studio" when he was only 19. He works in multimedia, graphic design, illustration, graffiti, and even music. He has done design projects using Fiat cars and Nike shoes and graffiti projects in various Chinese cities, in addition to his numerous animation video projects.
His art is now gaining world-wide recognition.
Lei Lei, also known as Ray Lei, is a young animator.
The work and the drawings he produces are jejune and childlike.
Lei's mode of expression is childlike, and he spends periods of time on his bike riding through the countryside around Beijing, decorating people's walls with his cartoons, bringing a youthfulness, against a backdrop of potential uniformity.
Lei Lei talked fascinatingly about memory and its impact on how we see the world around us. He spoke enthusiastically about the importance of memory in relation to art, and how the duty of the artist in some sense is to keep the past alive by reinventing it in the present. This is something that we see in the work of Bob Dylan and the transition from folk to pop music, or in the way for instance that an artist like Prince uses musicians like Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and George Clinton and integrates them into new forms.
Lei Lei is interested about what his part would be moving into the future, how his work, and the work of all authors could be responsible for holding the authorities to account, and to what extent their work might provoke change. Lei Lei is a talented artist, not purely for the quality of his artwork but because of the honorable ideas of it too – the content as well as the style. He sees a clear aim in his work, to question that which has not been questioned, which imbues a depth to his child-like cartoons that the style itself might ostensibly undermine.
[Hanif Kureishi]
Do you consider your talent a gift or a burden?
Both.
What you would do if one day you woke up and discovered you had lost your talent?
Find the talent back in my daily life.
Who is the living talent you most admire?
Imagination.
What do you like about your talent and what don't you like?
It makes me happy, but also brings me pain.
When or where does your talent make you happy?
When my imagination explodes at midnight.
If you could change your talent, how you would change it?
If I weren't a talented cartoonist, I think I would be a writer. Because animation can give people visual and auditory information but maybe it's too much.
Books only give words, but they leave more space for fantasy.
I hope I could write interesting stories, especially stories for children and for those people who still want to fly with their imagination.
