Lei Lei
Weekend
For many years now, Lei Lei has been rummaging around flea markets and second-hand bookshops for pictures in old books and vintage magazines. This artist’s Weekend project draws from his extensive collection, as he singles out, selects and assembles fragments of this astonishing visual archive. Lei Lei gives these documents a new lease of life in video collages that evoke the beginning of chronophotography and surrealist videos. Even though he did not take any of the photographs himself, he proves that photographs can be edited in infinite ways, giving pride of place to moving images. By combining analogue and digital approaches, this artist creates a new visual language and makes up artistic memories linked to the cinema of his childhood.
His Weekend project was awarded the Special Prize of the Jury by Grand Prix Images Vevey 2019/2020, presided over by Dayanita Singh.
Hand-Colored Photography
Thomas Sauvin (France, 1983) and Lei Lei collected, colorized, manipulated and animated anonymous black and white snapshots found at Chinese flea markets. In the process, sometimes repeated over a hundred times, they linked these photographs together and imagined that they might belong to the same person, thus revealing the infinite narrative potential of an image removed from its original context. Comprising nearly 1200 photographs, the Hand-Colored Photography installation shows the meticulous and titanic work the duo under-took to create, from scratch, the imaginary life of a Chinese citizen.
