Born in Nantong, Jiangsu, in 1963 Xu Lei studied ink painting at the Department of Fine Arts of Nanjing Art Academy and used to be a professional painter affiliated with the Jiangsu Institute of Chinese Painting. He is currently is in Beijing and works at the Graduate School of the China Art Academy, serves as the art director of the Today Art Museum, and is editor-in-chief of the magazine Classics. Xu was an active participant in the innovative art movements in China in the late 1980’s. He returned to ink painting in the 1990s. Well –versed in the classic fine-line (gongbi, detailed and elaborate) style of painting and influenced by traditional art, principally Song painting and woodcut illustrations from the Ming period, as well as by Surrealism and conceptual art, Xu Lei’s beautiful paintings rarely incorporate human figures. What counts is a haunting sense of loneliness and isolation, perhaps indicative of the fate of the individual in the contemporary world. His work was included in the major 1998 exhibition A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of the twentieth-century China organized by Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
