Rei Xiao's Chimeric Oil Paintings Explore Displacement and Hybridity

Rei Xiao's oil paintings depict figures in liminal states—crawling across snowy ground, suspended in webs, merging with animals. Born in Istanbul in 2000 to a Chinese-Turkish family, Xiao grew up with twenty foster cats, a proximity that informs her cross-species imagery. Her work, shown at Fragment Gallery in New York in 2025 in the solo exhibition "The Flea and the Acrobat," uses hybrid human-animal figures to explore themes of migration, identity, and belonging. Paintings like "Snowflakes dissolving in their own sticky blood" (2024) feature the Istanbul skyline, while "You've been Turked" (2025) incorporates an Ottoman cabinet and references a meme about Turkish identity. Xiao earned a BFA from SMFA at Tufts University on full scholarship, studied at Central Saint Martins, and has participated in residencies at Fountainhead Residency and The Macedonia Institute. She was shortlisted for the Bennett Prize in 2025.