LEI LEI: Story Told Once Again

LEI LEI: Story Told Once Again, co-presented by Modern Art Museum Shanghai and Gallery Where, brings together a selection of moving-image works made by Lei Lei over the past decade, from 2016 to 2026, inviting audiences into a drift through images. The exhibition is curated by Cao Dan, with Ren Boyu as associate curator, and is produced under the directorship of Yu Guangzhao, director of MAM Shanghai.

Storytelling is humanity's oldest impulse. In caves, around campfires, voice and image were kindled together—death, darkness, the inexplicable forces of nature were all wrapped into stories, made comprehensible, made bearable. Stories thus became collective memory, ethical mirror, the lifeblood through which culture endures. And yet stories have never been only the guardians of order: within myth there lurks rebellion and transgression, and every retelling threatens to unsettle the very things the story was meant to protect. A story is both inheritance and subversion; both consolation and interrogation.

Today, storytelling is no easy task. It means finding, within a glut of information and the accelerating tempo of technology, a place once again for feeling. It is precisely for this reason that Lei Lei's work feels so valuable: out of oral histories, fragmented online videos, official documentaries, commercial product catalogues, salvaged old photographs, and home video tapes, he weaves one warm-blooded "story" after another. These stories behave more like riddles, like amber left behind by time—embedding the texture of different media, the light of different eras, and emotional registers too complex to reduce to a single phrase.

In an age in which information is endlessly refreshed, overwritten, replaced, storytelling remains the way people form a relationship with the world. Between the grain of paper and the grain of film, between home movies and public memory, between the teller and the listener, it leaves behind a space that has not yet been fully spoken.