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  "description": "Rei Xiao works with oil on canvas, painting chimeric figures shaped by immigration and childhood. Based in Brooklyn. A Catapult Artist in Focus.",
  "path": "/rei-xiao-catapult-contemporary-artist-in-focus/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-12T03:51:23.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.catapult-platform.art",
  "tags": [
    "Rei Xiao's paintings",
    "reixiao.com",
    "@reixiao_",
    "Rei Xiao on Instagram",
    "catapult.art",
    "Submit your work →",
    "Artist in Focus",
    "Read More",
    "Exhibition",
    "Interview"
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  "textContent": "## Rei Xiao’s Chimeric Oil Paintings in Brooklyn\n\nFigures in Rei Xiao's paintings don't stand. They crawl across snowy ground with a city skyline behind them, press their faces against bodies larger than their own, hang suspended in webs with something dangling beneath.\n\nThe postures are specific: between animal and human, between arriving and leaving, between the city that made you and the one that hasn't decided yet..\n\n****Rei Xiao,**** installation view,  __The Flea and the Acrobat__ , Fragment Gallery, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist****Rei Xiao**** , installation view,  __The Flea and the Acrobat__ , Fragment Gallery, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist\n\nThe non-human is not decorative in this work. Sphynxes, spiders, and foster cats merge with human figures in ways that feel less like allegory and more like taxonomy, a visual record of what it means to be categorized as other.\n\nGrowing up as a Chinese-Turkish minority in Istanbul, Xiao shared a household with her single mother and twenty foster cats.\n\nThat cross-species proximity now operates in the paintings as both subject and formal premise: the animals are centered because they were present, because they mattered, and because they held a kind of belonging the city extended freely to strays but not always to her.\n\n* * *\n\n**Rei Xiao**\n\n**Born:**\nIstanbul, Turkey, 2000\n\n**Based in:**\nBrooklyn, NY, USA\n\n**Medium:**\nOil on Canvas, Oil on Panel\n\n**Education:**\nBFA, SMFA at Tufts University, Boston (2019–2023)\nCentral Saint Martins at UAL, London (2022)\n\n**Recent Exhibitions:**\n_The Flea and the Acrobat_ , Fragment Gallery, New York, 2025\n _Tectonic Memory_ , Evin Art Gallery, Istanbul, 2024\n _Katharsis: The Share of the Silent_ , Martch Art Project, Istanbul, 2024\n\n**Website:**\nreixiao.com\n\n**Instagram:**\n@reixiao_\n\n**Photography:**\nKyra Ferguson, Karli Evans\n\n**Image Courtesy:**\nCourtesy of the artist\n\n* * *\n\n> The dehumanized body does not reach for the human again. It reaches for the animal, which was always closer.\n\n* * *\n\n****Rei Xiao,**** __Snowflakes dissolving in their own sticky blood__ , oil on canvas, 2024. Courtesy of the artist\n\n _Snowflakes dissolving in their own sticky blood_ (2024) holds the fullest geography of the practice. A figure in a tracksuit moves on all fours across a field of white, the Istanbul skyline silhouetted behind her at dusk. Around her, objects have landed as if dropped mid-flight: a miniature ferry, an armchair, a stool, blood drops in the snow.\n\nThe figure looks directly at the viewer, her head too large for her body, her posture borrowed from the cats. The city exists as background and origin, unreachable, still present as outline.\n\n****Rei Xiao,**** __My soft and comfortable mama__ , oil on canvas, 2026. Courtesy of the artist****Rei Xiao**** ,  __Aqui Gatito__ , oil on canvas, 2025. Courtesy the artist ****Rei Xiao,****__You've been Turked__ , oil on canvas, 2025. Courtesy of the artist\n\nThe domestic objects in Xiao's work carry a specific address.  _You've been Turked_ (2025) centers on an ornate Ottoman display cabinet, the kind kept in living rooms and filled with tea sets and family photographs. A chimeric cat-human is stretched across the carved top, claws gripping the wood.\n\nInside the glass panels, a dark face is visible alongside glassware and lace. The title comes from a meme: a cat in a fez beside a glass of black tea, captioned \"You've been turked!\", part dare, part joke, something between a tag and a claim.\n\nWhat the painting takes from it is the verb: to be turked, to have an identity handed to you without being asked, the way a duty arrives, and the only thing left to do with it is carry it across the room.\n\nRei Xiao,  __You've been Turked__ in progress, Brooklyn, 2025. Courtesy the artist.****Rei Xiao,**** __Itsy bitsy spider__ , oil on panel, 2026. Courtesy the of the artist ****Rei Xiao,**** sketchbook study for  __Aqui Gatito__ , graphite, studio, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.****Rei Xiao,**** Graphite sketch, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.\n\nHybridity in the paintings never resolves into comfort. The Sphynx-like figure in  _Biscuits, biscuits_ presses against a larger body with a force that reads neither as aggression nor tenderness, but as something prior to both.\n\nXiao earned her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University on full scholarship. While at Tufts, she spent a semester at Central Saint Martins at the University of Arts, London.\n\nShe has recently participated in Fountainhead Residency in Miami and The Macedonia Institute in Chatham, NY, and was shortlisted for the Bennett Prize in 2025.\n\nHer first New York solo exhibition, \"The Flea and the Acrobat,\" was presented at Fragment Gallery in early 2025.\n\n****Rei Xiao**** , Study of a painting, Brooklyn, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.****Rei Xiao,**** __Biscuits, biscuits__ , oil on canvas, 2025. Courtesy of the artist****Rei Xiao**** , Brooklyn, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.\n\nThe biographical context matters, but the paintings hold more than it can contain. What Xiao makes visible, in the postures, in the furniture, in the cross-species arrangements, is the specific spatial logic of belonging somewhere that does not return the claim.\n\nThat the cats were real makes it neither more nor less true.\n\n* * *\n\nRei Xiao on Instagram\n\n****Rei Xiao**** , 2025. Photo: Kyra Ferguson.\n\n**About Catapult Contemporary - Art Platform Submission**\n\nThis is a exhibition review published by Catapult — an independent editorial platform for contemporary art, based in Vienna. We publish exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews, and critical context, with a focus on emerging and mid-career practices from Europe and beyond.\ncatapult.art\n\nWant to be featured? Submit your work →\n\n* * *\n\nArtist in Focus\n\n## Jie Zhang: Painting Gardens as Thresholds of Time\n\nRead More\n\nExhibition\n\n## BEINGS & CREATURES CHAPTER 4: BEYOND THE TANGIBLE\n\nRead More\n\nInterview\n\n## Jean-Robert Alcindor | Contemporary Figurative Painter on the rise!\n\nRead More\n\n##",
  "title": "What the Body Carries When the Address Changes",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-12T03:51:23.266Z"
}